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Title: The women of the Renaissance
A study of feminism
Author: René de Maulde la Clavière
Translator: George Herbert Ely
Release date: December 19, 2025 [eBook #77508]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1900
Credits: Tim Lindell, Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE ***
THE WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE
A STUDY OF FEMINISM
OPINIONS OF THE FRENCH PRESS.
“M. de Maulde has exhausted the subject, and gives us a sort of bible of
the feminine life.”—_Revue des Deux Mondes._
“Among the numerous writings on feminism which have appeared in
these latter days, none is more complete and entertaining than M. de
Maulde’s.”—_Journal des Débats._
“M. de Maulde has written a most captivating volume, which will remain a
definitive monument henceforth indispensable to anyone who wishes to know
the history of the French soul.”—_Revue des Revues._
“The question of feminism has been treated in masterly fashion by M. de
Maulde in his fine book on _The Women of the Renaissance_. And while he
draws the completest picture of French and Italian society in the 15th
and 16th centuries, and groups his finished portraits with accomplished
art, he at the same time marvellously depicts the charm and the influence
of women at that curious epoch.”—_République Française._
“It is almost impossible to name a more fascinating book for anyone
interested in history.... We have no idea of attempting to sum it up
or condense it in a few pages; it would suffer too seriously in the
process; we should merely like, without recommending it (which would be
superfluous) to the attention of our readers, to indicate its merit, its
charm, and its opportuneness.”—_Correspondant._
EXTRACT FROM A REVIEW IN _The Athenaeum_.
“M. de Maulde writes in great detail and with commendable erudition
on the position of women and the feminist movement of the sixteenth
century as it shaped itself in Italy and, later, in France. These
studies of the woman of those days, in all her social relations and in
all her activities, are illustrated with an unceasing flow of anecdote
and citation, never more apt than when employed to characterise
that remarkable group who were imbued with the so-called ‘idées
platoniciennes.’... After a really interesting sketch of the composition
of that curious amalgam which finds its complete expression in the
harangue of Bembo ... M. de Maulde draws many inferences which have a
direct application to the feminist movement of our own day; in contrast,
for instance, with the mystical ardours of Renaissance platonism we hear
of the naturalism of John Ruskin. For this reason the book will, we
think, attract a wide circle of readers; many ... will be delighted by
its store of lively and significant anecdote.”
[Illustration]
The Women of
the Renaissance
_A Study of Feminism_
By
R. de Maulde la Clavière
Translated by
George Herbert Ely
“The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers, but
they rise behind her steps, not before them.”—RUSKIN.
_With a Portrait of the Author_
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons
London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Lim.
1900
To
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
EDITOR OF TUDOR TRANSLATIONS
THIS VERSION IS
INSCRIBED
CORRIGENDA
Transcriber’s Note: These corrections have been applied.
Page 8, line 21, _for_ Women’s _read_ Woman’s.
Page 39, foot-note, _for_ precèdent l’amour _read_ procèdent de l’amour.
Page 148, line 20, _for_ Saint-Marthe _read_ Sainte-Marthe.
Page 191, line 13, _for_ Joconda _read_ Gioconda.
Page 191, line 22, _for_ exuberance _read_ encumbrance.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
No mere translator can hope to preserve the style of his original, and
herein M. de Maulde is bound to suffer more than most writers. There
is no one to whom Buffon’s phrase, _Le style est l’homme même_, may be
more justly applied. His work is absolutely himself; it derives from
his original personality and his wide and sure learning an historical
value and a literary charm almost unique. He is a wit with the curiosity
and patience of the scholar, and a scholar with the temperament of the
artist. The sparkle and humour of his conversation are crystallised in
his letters, the charming expression of a large and generous nature.
Trained at the École des Chartes, M. de Maulde held for a few years
an appointment in the prefectoral administration. But his tastes drew
him rather to history than to politics. In 1886 he founded the Société
d’Histoire diplomatique, of which he has been the life and soul, and
which owes its success mainly to his activity and enthusiasm. He is the
founder also of the Congrès internationaux d’histoire, of which the first
was held at the Hague in the summer of 1898, when official delegates
from all the great countries of the world met amicably to discuss
international relations in the cold light of scientific history. For many
years he has been a member of our Royal Society.
But it is above all as a student of the Renaissance that M. de Maulde
takes high rank among contemporary scholars. He has made a close study
of that great movement, in regard both to the internal politics of France
and the origins of modern diplomacy, and to the general march of ideas
and the evolution of manners. The results of his studies are embodied in
a remarkable series of works, the earliest being a book entitled _Les
Origines de la Révolution française au commencement du xviᵉ siècle_—a
brilliant picture of French Society at that critical epoch. This was
succeeded by the first part, in three volumes, of an _Histoire de Louis
XII._, and this by the three volumes entitled _La diplomatie au temps de
Machiavel_. Other works in the same series are two volumes on _Jeanne
de France, duchesse d’Orléans_ and _Louise de Savoie et François Iᵉʳ_.
In all these M. de Maulde shows the profound erudition and the just
critical sense to be expected in an historian of the school of Fustel
des Coulanges, together with a literary grace and a lightness of touch
with which the scientific historian is too rarely endowed. His brief
experience of official politics seems to have left him with an urbane
scepticism, a benevolent irony, which serve only to set off his radical
enthusiasm for great ideas and for the great conceptions of art. At
bottom an idealist, he has interpreted with insight and humour the
aesthetic and spiritualist revolution of the Renaissance, nowhere more
characteristically than in the present volume.
With M. de Maulde’s consent the greater part of his footnotes are
omitted—mainly references to authorities unknown or inaccessible to the
English reader, and useless without the complete bibliography omitted
by desire of the French publishers, MM. Perrin et Cie. A few notes are
added within brackets: for these and for the Index the translator is
responsible.
The translator is under great obligations to the Baronne Louise
Dupont-Delporte, who, at M. de Maulde’s request, has compared the
proofs of this book with the original text, and to whose watchfulness
and friendly care heartiest acknowledgments are due. The same task of
collation was undertaken by Mr. David Frew, whose frank, tonic, kindly
criticism has been of the highest value. Thanks are also tendered to
all who in various ways and with constant kindness have given their
assistance in the course of this work, among whom M. de Maulde himself
has laid the translator under a large debt of gratitude.
_August, 1900._
CONTENTS
PREAMBLE
Masculinism of Anglo-Saxon countries—Feminism of Latin
countries. Pages 1-5
INTRODUCTION
Italian origin of the Renaissance feminist movement—Protests
against war, force, the materialisation of the religious spirit
and the hollowness of learning—Recourse to the affections—Quest
of true happiness—Idealism: woman chooses the method—“Love
and faith”—Crusade of love—Worship of life and hatred of
death—Women the motive-force of life—Active and tranquillising
rôle of Italian women in the 16th century—Conquest of France
by the new spirit—General sentiment of the new society. Pages 6-20
_BOOK I. FAMILY LIFE_
CHAPTER I
MARRIAGE
Marriage, its realist character and its difficulties—The
aim of marriage not personal satisfaction—The girl married
blindfold—The father—Marriageable age—Interviews—Reflections of
the father—Ideas of the bridegroom elect—His physical and moral
criterion—His uneasiness—Final crisis—Ideas of Michelangelo
and Raphael—Marriage ceremonies and festivities—Weddings at
Naples, Florence, and Venice—Behind the scenes—Weddings in
France—Brides’ journeys—Moral aspects. Pages 21-44
CHAPTER II
THE MARRIED WOMAN
The genius of motherhood—Marriage a physical science—Domestic
difficulties—Platonism in marriage—Semi-wives—Wives in name
only—Vocation of women for medicine—Women as sick-nurses—as
doctors—Enfranchisement of women as regards medicine—Intimacies
between women and doctors—Women’s medical collections—Hygienic
rules—Neurasthenia—Woman as home-ruler—The châtelaine—Her
management of retainers—The science of charity—Principles of
great houses. Pages 45-69
CHAPTER III
THE CHILDREN
1. _Maternity._—Tendency to small families, its various
causes—Marital misfortunes—How new arrivals were
received—Unpopularity of feeding by the mothers—Children
educated by the mother till the age of seven—Old system
of hardening—New system based on reason. 2. _The
Boys._—Necessity of developing individualism among
them—Paternal education—Growing influence of the mother—College
life—Greatness and decadence of tutors—Understanding between
tutors and mothers—Excessive production of young men of
fashion—Influence of the new ideas—Decline of the spirit
of toil and discipline. Pages 70-85
CHAPTER IV
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS
Girls brought up solely by their mothers—Old theory
of early marriage—Education, especially physical and
moral—Opinion of moralists and physicians: counsels of Anne
of France—Utilitarian system of Germany—The intensive school:
Vivès; St. Theresa; the Spanish system—The aesthetic school:
Dolce; the Italian system—Louise of Savoy—New theory of late
marriage—Protests against the realism of education—Tutors
of girls—Moral freedom of girls—Protests against what they
read—The story for girls, after Anne of France—The flirt—The
hunt for a husband—Various ideas on that matter—Coquetry,
intrigue, chambermaids—Jean Raulin’s sermon—Open-air life. Pages 86-108
CHAPTER V
THE HUSBAND, AND THE VARIOUS WAYS OF SLIPPING HIS YOKE
The husband lord and master: his absolute authority—The
stick—The wife’s insignificance—The husband’s grievances
against marriage—The wife’s grievances—Beware love!—_Modus
vivendi_—Women dowered or not: growth of women’s influence
on the dowry system—Practical philosophy—Unsatisfied
affections—Wives separated or divorced—Widows—Sentimental
finery—The wife of a dead husband—Classical widows: their
spirit of order and piety—Gay widows—Widows’ virtue—Advantages
and disadvantages of widowhood—Re-marriage—Sincerity of
women’s praise of marriage. Pages 109-135
_BOOK II. SOCIAL LIFE_
CHAPTER I
PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
Individualistic and anti-philosophic spirit of
France—Flourishing of the salons—Reign of money: legitimated
in Italy—The Roman programme—French society—Proposed remedies
against Christian socialism—Anne of France—School of Cardinal
d’Amboise—Principles of sentimental sociology—Social _raison
d’être_ of platonism—Its Florentine origin—Development
of the doctrine—Intellectual aristocracy—Platonism a
fashionable craze—Discussions on the real character of
love—Cataneo—Eloquent Bembo—Petrarchism—Elevation of
sentiments by platonism—Michelangelo—French opposition
to platonism—Triumph of platonism through Italianism and
feminism—Anne of France—Margaret of France and her general
philosophy. Pages 137-176
CHAPTER II
THE SCIENCE OF PLATONISM
Is platonism dangerous for women?—Double system for catching
men: passion and sensibility—To spread love the end of life
and the secret of happiness—Platonic virtue—Criticism of
this virtue in practice—School of Anne of France—Vittoria
Colonna and Michelangelo—Philosophic school—Multiplication and
withdrawal of favours—Love through duty—Love of princesses—The
veil of mystery—Practical recruiting of platonism—Sources of
love or second love. Pages 177-193
CHAPTER III
THE MISSION OF BEAUTY
Science consists in extracting the element of happiness
from everything, first of all from oneself—Beauty a social
duty—Charm has no physical rules—Women slight or the reverse;
blondes; the skin, the eyes—Corporeal beauty—Michelangelo and
Dürer—Portraits of women as Venus—Prudence of women—Artists and
their fancies—Jeanne of Aragon—Margaret of France—Receptions
in the morning—The ‘Innocents’—Art of retaining youth, or of
restoring youthfulness—A lady’s toilette—Fashion—Spiritual
significance of colours—Luxury—Architecture—Taste for fine
furniture. Pages 194-227
CHAPTER IV
THE EMBROIDERY OF LIFE
The science of dining—Table-talk—Balls and dancing: custom of
kissing—Protests of the Reformers—Church—Pilgrimages—Gardens
and country life—Flowers—Pugs and parrots—The horse—Hunting,
Roman and platonist—Hunting philosophised; Budé and Blondo—Park
animals—Nature—Life at watering-places; pure water; gravity
and fun. Pages 228-260
CHAPTER V
INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES
The library—Curiosity divided and dilettante in
character—Taste for tales, jest-books, romances—The old
poets—Music—Instruments, the human voice—Intellectual
music—Harmony—Sacred music—Chamber music—The
orchestra—Discussion on the abuse of music—The
theatre—‘Phaedra,’ Bibbiena—The _Calandra_—Opposition to
the theatre—French ideas. Pages 261-283
CHAPTER VI
CONVERSATION
Art of conversation: its supreme rôle—Women’s
triumph—Tone of conversation—Philosophical
spirit—Variety of form—Subjects of conversation—French
conversation—Quips and cranks—Conversational
dallyings—Stories—Dissertations—Gaieties—Correspondence,
its revival—Family letters—Letters in the grand style—Tone
of letters—Some Italian letters. Pages 284-310
_BOOK III. THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN_
CHAPTER I
POLITICAL INFLUENCE
Women remain strangers to the keener activities: war,
justice—Women, political in spite of themselves—Isabella
of Aragon—Jeanne of Aragon—Anne of France—Return from
ambition to love—Restless women—Renée of France—Purely
defensive heroism of women—Ladies of Sienna and
Pisa—Isabella the Catholic—Catherine Sforza—Woman
according to Michelangelo. Pages 311-324
CHAPTER II
MORAL INFLUENCE
The good old times—Moral degeneration—Ambition, money—Evil, to
be cured homœopathically as in Italy, or allopathically as in
Germany?—Virtue, must it necessarily be tiresome?—Raphael’s
embarrassment—The antiplatonists—Louise of Savoy, Rabelais—The
work of amelioration by two methods. (i) _The softening of
virtue_—Different systems in regard to marriage; free union;
system of contract; the double marriage—Firenzuola—Marriages
of affection—Secondary platonism, a compromise—Alms without
significance, to lure the human animal—Sipping at love, by way
of Italian dilettantism—The attack—Love a dream—Prayer. (ii)
_The ennoblement of vice_—Attempt at purification of carnal
love—The Italian courtesans, and their moral influence—Tullia
d’Aragona—Imperia—Venice—Francis I.—French system of the double
household—Diana of Poitiers—Bembo in tears—Infatuation—The
feminising of men—The question of the beard. Pages 325-371
CHAPTER III
INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE
Conquest of men by mind—Army of intellectual women—Isabella
d’Este—Anne of France—Margaret of France: her theory—The
friends and guests of Margaret—Intellectual headquarters
of France—Egerias —Difficulty of this government—Vittoria
Colonna and Aretino—Flatteries and compliments—Supervision
of manuscripts—Affection—Pecuniary aid—Necessity of feminine
patronage. Pages 372-397
CHAPTER IV
INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE (_Continued_)
Results of feminine influence—Literature in praise of
women—Pompeo Colonna—Two schools of taste: passion,
sensibility—Castiglione—Literature of conversation—Fugitive
poems—Temples of high poetry—Literature of poodles and
birds—The ancestor of Vert-Vert—Spanish women—France,
Lyons—Accusation of frivolity—German scepticism—The struggle
in France—For or against women—Timidity of Frenchwomen—Spirit
of the prelates. Pages 398-421
CHAPTER V
RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE
Progress of religious sensibility—Women compared to the
moon—Entrance of the sentimental spirit—Free enquiry at Rome
and in Italy—Philosophic religion—Entrance on the scene of
women as priests, as well as physicians—Religious traditions
of women in France—Decay of faith—Roman liberalism—Situation
of the French clergy—Alliance between women and the
aesthetic clergy—Liberal principles of this alliance—The
_bibliennes_—Aristocratic religion—Writings of the mystic
women: Gabrielle de Bourbon, Catherine d’Amboise—The mystic
writings of Margaret of France, her ideas—Her relations
with the _palinods_—The mystics—The mysticism of divided
application—Direct communion with God—Smiling character of
the new mysticism—Spiritual petrarchism—Correggio—Vittoria
Colonna—Vergerio. Pages 422-453
CHAPTER VI
RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE (_Continued_)
Scorners of mystic liberalism—The savants—Reproaches
addressed to the liberal party: paganism, materialism—Women’s
struggle against these tendencies—The monks: the monastic
spirit—Struggle against the monks: the pros and
cons—Rabelais—Folengo—The German monks—Rising of the
lower clergy against liberalism and aestheticism: Luther,
Calvin—Struggle of the Reformers against women and liberty
of thought—Vittoria Colonna and Ochino—Direction of the
liberal and aesthetic party in France—Margaret of France
and her active rôle—Feminist theory of Postel—Replies of
Luther, the Sorbonne, the theological parties. Pages 454-474
CONCLUSION
Total want of success of the feminist movement—Disappointments
of Margaret of France—Reaction against cosmopolitanism and
intellectualism—The spirit of the Pléiade—Love of free
air—Margaret of Savoy—Fall of the Roman spirit—Montaigne—Last
effects of feminism—The triumph of Death—The mistakes of
the Renaissance feminism—Disappearance of the aesthetic
system—Sensualism of the 18th century—The naturalism of
Ruskin. Pages 475-503
INDEX. Pages 504-510
PREAMBLE
The woman question—what is more absorbing?
What do women want? What do they demand? They have been shamefully
neglected. To judge by the code, there never were such beings on earth.
But the code has hallowed iniquities. The education of women is pitiable.
They ought to know every thing—and are taught nothing. They are deficient
in intelligence—they are too intelligent. They ought to have their
separate careers, their separate circles, their independence—to be the
equals of their husbands, to be men and yet remain women. They ought to
have votes—that, it appears, forms one element of happiness. Many people
in England are even dreaming of suppressing marriage; and it must be
observed that, as Englishmen largely expatriate themselves, there is no
lack of involuntary spinsters, who are by no means the least ardent in
prosecuting the campaign. In short, it is a very babel. Everyone has
something to say. The press, the stage, the pulpit, all resound with
these questions—to say nothing of public meetings, private meetings,
at-homes, lectures. The subject is well-nigh done to death; it has,
moreover, a special tendency to lose itself in mist, and there is no sort
of cohesion in outlook or aim.
Nowhere is this anarchy more patent than in education. How are you to
tell young girls what they ought to be, what they ought to learn and
think and know, when you are absolutely in the dark as to what you want
to make of them? Are they to play the same part in life as men, or to
perform public duties, equal, perhaps superior, to theirs, but different?
Are they to marry early, or late? Ought they to see and know, before
marriage, all there is to see and know? Or is it their blissful privilege
to enjoy the pleasant things of life in deliberate ignorance of all the
rest, and, in their piping time of peace, to turn the divine hours of
youth to the best advantage? Once married, what is their mission to be?
How far will it profit them to have learnt the whole art of household
management? Should they exercise any influence out of doors? If so, what?
Will their influence consist in preserving their good looks and their
skill in dancing? Or is their influence to be a serious thing? Is it to
be intellectual, or religious, or moral, or artistic, or scientific?
These questions jostle one another in some confusion.
And the confusion is irritating, because it compels us to grope our
way haphazard. The education of girls has seriously suffered thereby;
it has been frittered away, has bred a habit of easy contentment with
superficial ideas rather than of resolutely, earnestly, thoroughly
mastering what it is proper to know. The mind, like the body, has its
nervous system, and to obtain its full measure of energy it is needful to
husband its resources.
Now, we may get some light on this complicated problem if we refer it
to experience, or, in other words, apply the lessons of the past. We
often encounter in the world, in regard to history, and more especially
the history of morals, a singular prejudice in the form of a certain
optimism (or pessimism) which imbues us with the idea that we are the
first or almost the first denizens of the globe—that all the generations
whose blood flows in our veins, whose feelings throb in our breasts,
whose traditions govern our thoughts, were composed of beings essentially
unlike ourselves, upon whom things must necessarily have made different
impressions. This idea is not absolutely correct; in reality, we depend
on our ancestors to an almost incredible degree. We are fettered by
innumerable bonds of their bequeathing—bonds of love and hate, and
prejudices of every kind; they hold us in leash as we ourselves hold our
descendants. The generations flit by so swiftly that they have barely
time to transmit life ere they are gone.
Especially in regard to the condition of women, the questions that are
agitated to-day with more or less airiness or vehemence are almost as old
as the hills. At certain periods they have been investigated more closely
than at others, and then learning, philosophy, and experience have said
their say.
The Renaissance was one of the epochs at which these questions pushed
to the front. Like our own age, it was a period of transition; its
conclusions were often very different from our own, but in some points it
bore a wonderful likeness to the present day. The position of women then
underwent an almost inevitable transformation, both material and moral.
Up to that time women had been regarded as inferior to men; opinion was
built up on the practical and utilitarian basis still cherished in the
Anglo-Saxon countries: all modes of activity belonged to the men, while
the women’s duty was to remain at home as domestic ornaments, precious,
but fragile.
Yet society was not wholly averse to granting women what we call the
right to a career. The Salic law was exclusively a French invention, and
the product of special circumstances; in the political world there was
nothing to prevent the acceptance of aid from women, even in the midst of
the gravest perils. It was a woman—and a woman to the finger-tips—Isabel
of Bavaria, who all but ruined us; Joan of Arc was our salvation. It is
not too much to say that, in later years, the honour and might of France
were saved by Anne of Beaujeu and Louise of Savoy. The same thing holds
from top to bottom of the social ladder. In certain towns women might
have been seen taking part in elections in the public square;[1] in many
of the châteaux the lady of the place, in the absence of her husband,
fulfilled the most trying and masculine of tasks, administering justice,
commanding the men-at-arms. Christine de Pisan speaks of this, not as a
right, but as a rigorous duty.[2] Among the working classes female labour
was extensively employed, at a fairly high rate of pay.
But no one saw in this, as the opinion of Christine de Pisan shows, a
direct and natural outlet for women’s activities. A woman was regarded
as the subject of her husband, and his deputy in case of need; hers
was not a personal part; she was only the shadow or the extension of
another person—a sort of half-man, or, as caustic folk said, an _homme
d’occasion, mas occasionnatus_—a man marred in the making. (It must
be confessed that this idea is rather hard on the ladies, and even on
us men, more particularly because Providence does not take us into
consultation in these matters, and all of us, men and women alike, have
the assurance of remaining to the end of our days male or female as God
made us.) On that system, it was allowable for women in cases of absolute
necessity to perform the tasks of men, though the men could scarcely
offer to reciprocate; if there was no help for it, women might adopt a
trade or profession, but that appeared undesirable. All the countries
faithful to these ideas were utilitarian countries, where men had
incontestably the upper hand, and where no great need was felt for lofty
flights.
In the countries of Latin blood and spirit they start from a principle
absolutely the reverse. Women are not at all “men for the nonce”; in the
picturesque words of good François de Moulins, addressed to his pupil
Francis I., “Never forget that women came from Adam’s side, not from
his feet.” They are not substitutes for men, but have their own proper
sphere. Castiglione has given us the typical formula in his famous book
_The Courtier_. “Man,” says he, “has for his portion physical strength
and external activities; all doing must be his, all inspiration must
come from woman.” She is, in his own words, the “motive force.” One
recalls the smiling remark of the charming Duchess of Burgundy: “I am
always delighted when it is women who govern, because then it is men who
direct.” But according to Castiglione, the world ought to show the very
opposite: men should govern and women direct; men act, women think, or
mayhap dream. The former should have the material tasks of administration
and practical affairs; the latter the spiritual and idealist realm.
Looked at in this way, it is obvious how much larger the woman’s part
suddenly becomes, and what supreme importance it holds in the life of the
world. Instead of serving her husband merely as the material replenisher
of his stock and an under-manager for his affairs, the woman will carve
out her own path and enjoy personal freedom, and will be the better
able to lift up her head at home and in society for knowing that she
represents there something more than the flesh; she will be the soul, the
seeker after noble thoughts—thoughts necessary to happiness, but which
the practical spirit of men scarcely permits them to pursue. There will
be no question (to the great disappointment of certain modern aesthetes,
who after all profit very largely by the railways and telegraphs) of
declaring a relentless war against industry, manufactures, the business
of administration; this unpleasing but serviceable sphere must simply be
left to men, and upon this sordid earthly existence must be erected the
frail edifice of general happiness—the true life—a life of enthusiasm,
beauty, and thought; in other words, we must relax the bonds of the
material life, take time to fetch our breath, and infuse into realism a
new and brighter spirit by means of the love of the beautiful. That is
women’s task; in the words of Ecclesiastes, “Their hearts are snares and
nets, their hands are as chains.” They are the queens of happiness, and
they must compel us to be happy and to enjoy the happiness necessary to
us.
With this end in view, the women of the Renaissance formed a league:
they accomplished on behalf of the rights of the heart a sort of _coup
d’état_, the story of which we are about to relate. Finally, no one was
happy after all. But it is interesting to know why.
First, let us explain in a few words how it came about that in a country
like France women were able to assume so important a part. Then, we shall
proceed to show how vast was their effort, how ardent their quest for
happiness, and we shall see why the formula they discovered has not come
down to us.
INTRODUCTION
France is a singular country. We are slightly Greek, half Latin or
Ligurian, very Gallic or very German, and in the West, the country of
an intellectual gulf-stream, we are dreamers—the Celts of M. Legouvé’s
enthusiasm. All of us, whatever our stock, professed in the Middle Ages
to adore women; the author of an old _fabliau_ makes the Virgin ask of
one of our gallant knights the subtle and searching question, “Is thy
lady fairer than I?” But in practice—in other words, in our home life—we
treated women like animals, with the whip.
We must remark also that, during the whole course of the fifteenth
century, France had no time for philosophising: the Hundred Years War
and the awful distresses resulting from it; the iron hand and heavy
taxation of Louis XI., whose rule was regenerative but very severe; then
the Civil War and the Italian expedition—all these circumstances left
us no breathing-space, and are in some measure the justification of an
aftermath of brutality. It was only in the last years of the century that
peace allowed us to reflect, and then activity, prosperity, and happiness
burst out like a lightning-flash. Louis XI., who had clear and definite
rights over France, had dealt with her like a strenuous husband; Louis
XII., who wedded her by chance, treated her with the delicate worship of
a lover who has thrown off the every-day concerns of life.
By what happy chance did the French, till then so apt, whatever they
professed, to value women only on the physical side, take under the
influence of kindly peace and individual well-being a step further
towards the South, and come to think that women might serve as social
guides? The genesis of these ideas was very remarkable.
They came from elsewhere.
During our convalescence, Italy had become transformed. A great
revolution, moral, religious, scientific, and above all aesthetic, had
brought once more upon the arena the two eternal protagonists—the Roman
spiritualists, and the friends of material force, that is, of imperial
Germany.
Men are in general inclined to the side of force; their idea of happiness
consists in imposing their will upon others, no matter how brutally, or
at any rate in donning a uniform—they are born fighters or jockeys.
Women, on the contrary, can only hope to exert direct and effectual
action by the spiritualising of society; and it is not by handing
themselves over to the tender mercies of men, whoever they may
be—husbands, lovers, doctors, hydrotherapists—or by aping the manners and
talk of men, that they acquire their liberty. They are taken at their own
valuation, provided they accentuate their purely feminine qualities.
This was thoroughly understood by the women of Italy, who managed so well
that the crisis turned quite naturally to their advantage, without any
theories whatever.[3] Neither the accepted classics nor Plato gave them
any assistance; they triumphed of themselves, and often at their own
cost, because they accomplished their own education before undertaking
that of others. Many of them, instructed, stout-hearted, nobly generous,
while men were wasting their activities abroad, consistently embodied at
home the superb saying of Christ, “Let not your heart be troubled”—the
only prescription yet discovered for the cure of neurasthenia. People
poked fun at them, accused them of “wanting to wear the breeches.”[4]
Italian husbands were no more inclined than others to fall at their
wives’ feet and proclaim their divinity: they accustomed themselves to
them gradually, almost unawares. It was natural that the disappointments,
vexations and trials of politics or business should throw them in this
direction; what was more fortunate and less expected was that, women
having monopolised all that made life worth living, men one day awoke to
the fact that women were the glory of all distinguished families, and
that, thanks to them, life had become an art, a passion.
They began, then, by shedding a domestic radiance; it was by filling
their own home with light and hope and joy that they began to quicken
the world at large. The science of happiness established itself under
a wholly practical and empirical form, like the science of medicine;
for the heart needs the ministry of healing, a more difficult and
perhaps more delicate art than that of the body. Where can you apply a
thermometer to test the temperature of the soul? Moral sufferings have
the peculiarity of concealing themselves, even when physical collapse
is the result; they are not easily diagnosed, and no one understands
them: and, further, they manifest themselves oddly. It is in the pride
of life, when one feels strongest, that one is weak and in danger; peace
is more treacherous than strife, health more perilous than sickness,
strength feebler than weakness. Or, if one is conscious of the mischief,
one despairs of finding the remedy, which consists of compassion and
generosity. Woman’s medicines are love and hate.
Love—that is to give something derived from herself; to act, not through
that long-armed vulgar charity (though this, too, has its merits—and
is often very tiresome) which aims at heading a subscription list or
presiding at a public meeting, but through that modest individual charity
which humbly and quietly diffuses a little affection, cheerfulness,
and enthusiasm. These are the real great ladies; to them, giving is a
necessity, a second nature. They are born generous. They seek their own
happiness in the happiness of others, without stopping to ask themselves
if their conduct is philosophic.
Hate! They detest and resolutely combat the elements of force in which
men most delight, but which, as women believe, produce the worst ills;
and these are, the power of money, the power of war.
The egotism of wealth they regard as the very source of materialism,
against which they cannot but struggle. On this point the women of the
Renaissance bore the brunt of a long and skilfully fought battle, which
we shall follow in all its phases.
As for war, that is the arch-enemy against which their first blows are
aimed. The little Italian wars of the Middle Ages did not resemble the
vast hecatombs of to-day, but they bred a swarm of atrocities, tumults
and feuds; war is less cruel, perhaps, when it is not a mere pastime. To
storm a place at the opening of a campaign is regarded as a humane act
and good tactics, since in the long run it shortens the struggle; but
the horror of it! Naturally, women are the worst sufferers. In vain do
they push their way through the flames to the feet of some cold stone
angel or some Madonna with her eternal smile; you see poor girls flinging
themselves into the water, and noble ladies going about serenely and
deftly to save what can be saved—their husbands’ lives or their own
fortunes. Many centuries had passed since St. Augustine had offered
his tender consolations to the victims of the barbarians; they might
appropriately have been offered when the French captured Padua or the
Germans Rome, or even at that obscure assault of Rivolta in 1509, when
an Italian captain devoured the heart of one of his political enemies,
disembowelled the man’s wife, and made horse-troughs of their corpses.
Even if we ignore gross infamies like these, war was not more humane. The
historian of Bayard cannot find words to celebrate the magnanimity of his
hero in so generously respecting two high-born maidens of Brescia who had
received him into their house, tended him and healed his wounds with the
devotion of sisters of mercy. And even in times of peace military habits
were commonly so intolerable that quiet folk fervently prayed for a war
to bring them relief.
For centuries sages and philosophers had been expatiating on the evils of
war; councils had attempted to intervene; but war continued to flourish.
The idea of suppressing it seemed a mere Utopian dream.
They might have tried at least to stem its flood by an appeal to the
co-operation of moral forces; but, singularly enough, the more brilliant
the fifteenth century in Italy became in art and intellect, the more its
moral forces appeared to decline.
Christianity, too often sunk into mere mechanical routine, teeming with
abuses, overloaded with observances, had practically lost all influence.
Side by side with a few clergy somewhat above the rank and file in
culture, there was a crowd of empirics who rarely troubled their heads
with thinking things out for themselves; they discoursed, not of love
or hope, but only of faith—a faith which brutish men wished to destroy,
and the more refined few wished to vivify, and which was thus doubly
imperilled. The common people were indifferent, and allowed themselves
still to be lulled by the old crooning melodies to which they were
accustomed; they remained Christian from sheer indolence, like many men
of quality; but it was open to question whether the first shock would
not set them clamouring for a more lively tune—an “air of flutes and
violins,” as Heine said; paradise instead of hell.
As to learning, the cultured were agreed in recognising its failure;
that, indeed, was beyond question. Men were tired of reasoning, reading,
writing, worrying! Learning in tragic dismay sought only to prostrate
itself before faith; or rather, men asked themselves whether learning
really existed. Tiphernus, an eminent professor at the Sorbonne, and in
high favour at Rome, confesses that all this learning so much belauded
and paraded seemed to him nothing but a means of earning a living for
professors, a combination of all the vanities, the technical slang of a
crowd of pedants, critics more or less ignorant, and shameless imitators,
who formed little cliques beyond whose pale there was no salvation. “To
believe them,” he exclaimed, “we are not equal to the ancients”: then
lions forsooth have lost their ferocity, and hares their cowardice, for
Providence shines for the whole world, and it cannot be that man alone
has degenerated! A league of falsehood! he reiterates. Under cloak of
high culture men conceal their vices, and especially their idleness.
Do what we may, we are progressing: every one of us is conscious of a
forward impulsion. The pontiffs of reason, who have painfully climbed the
steep ascent, wish to keep everything to themselves, and to set up their
books as a balk to the world, but all in vain; they will never persuade
us that their collapse is that of nature.
Tiphernus died about 1466. From that time forth science was flouted. It
gave the world, nevertheless, what it was destined to give—fire-arms,
Greece, many admirable things—everything but happiness, which it had
never undertaken to provide. And it was precisely on this point that
the great mistake was made. What, men asked, is the good of learning,
money, labour, or even semblances of joy, if we are oppressed by a life
of contention and heaviness? Why are we born with wits, why should we
rule multitudes, thrill men’s souls, dwell in palaces, if our hearts
are empty? Suppose we wrest Nature’s secrets from her, work every vein
of ore, crop every blade of grass: suppose the race of men to form one
magnificent herd, fat and flourishing, and even peaceably inclined—what
is the good of it all if there is no joy? All things live by love; the
heart makes itself heard above the claims of work, above the intellect,
demanding for life a recompense, a goal. We perish for lack of something
to love; out of mere self-pity we ought to bestow on ourselves the alms
of life, which is love. All is vanity save this vanity, for before our
birth, until our death, throughout our whole existence, it bears in front
of us the torch of life.
Perhaps it might be better if men could be governed mechanically and
reasonably from an armchair in the library by dint of syllogisms.
Unhappily, they love only what pleases them; they are big, greedy
children, listless and lazy if you talk to them of reason, but ready to
break their necks in pursuit of an illusion. Hence it is very necessary
to choose one’s illusions well, and well to employ them.
The eternal illusion is love.
But what _is_ love? That is the real question. If it is a Petrarchan
flower, we crush it under our steel-tipped boots; if it is a coarse
sensation, it crushes us, and we have to wrestle with it. Thus we must
arrive at a new fact—a love which is neither a beautiful superfluity nor
a vile sensual thing; which, in short, is a direct outcome of the worship
of beauty.
We must discover a new sensibility, lofty, strong, fruitful, spiritual,
almost sacerdotal, which serves to link minds together in their common
pursuit of a high ideal. To us French this intricate problem seemed
highly discouraging and perhaps silly, but its importance was recognised
in Italy, the classic ground of love’s quintessences, where even to-day
a candidate for Parliament had better speak of love than of the sugar
bounties.
The science of sensibility is to most men a fountain sealed; they always
fancy themselves to be too robust! They march straight on in parallel
lines; military devotion is their virtue; women alone can serve as a
bond of union, soften and beautify everything, cover with a varnish of
glory and disinterestedness the things that need it. Hence, besides
their mission at home, they may be said to have a social part of the
first importance to play; the more sensible men become to their social
influence, the higher is man’s civilisation.
Now at the very period when France decided to move, the women of Italy
had long since shown what could be expected of women in this direction.
They often flaunted sentiments which are open to the charge of audacity
or naïveté, primitive sentiments, à la Botticelli or Perugino, crude to
a degree; there were manifestly many women of young and fresh affections
who opposed to the simplicity of brute force that charming form of
simplicity, that adorable confidence in the things of life, which the
worship of the beautiful gives to unsoiled souls. They are to the
women of the eighteenth century what Memling is to Watteau. Properly
to understand their spiritual condition we should have to do as they
did—solve the problem of feminism in the feminine way, be women, and more
than women—arch-women.
The fulfilment of their natural vocation, namely, to look after the
amenities of life, was a pretty extensive office, in a country where
art and taste had so prominent a place. But they went farther. They
inculcated moral strength through beauty; they dreamt of raising men,
of plunging into their life like rescuing angels. Some critics say that
the intervention of women is always a proof of men’s decadence, and
that when they save us, we are in parlous need of saving. Unhappily
that is our normal state. Women assuredly represent the Red Cross of
society; it is the duty of us men to be purblind and case-hardened to the
brutalities of life, or even to find a certain happiness therein, and to
remain cold like a sword-blade; women have no right to escape wounding
by the despicable and shameful things among us. They would prefer, you
say, to remain quietly gathering flowers behind their park walls; that
is perfectly true; they only act from a sense of duty, because they no
longer wish to serve as the stake of battles, because there is no misery,
no injustice, no disgrace for which a woman of heart does not feel
responsible. In fulfilling this mission they do not humble us; on the
contrary, we can have no higher ambition than to desire peace, no action
can less degrade us than to bend in respect before the noblest things in
the world—weakness and sentiment. It was the conviction of all the sons
of the Renaissance, and of its great-grandsons (even the last and most
sceptical of them, like M. Mérimée), that sentiment has higher lights
than reason, and that certain intuitions of the heart unfold to us, as
in bygone days to Socrates, horizons hitherto beyond our ken—a foretaste
of the divine. Tired of spinning round in the vain and narrow circle
of reasoning, these men, sceptics in their own despite, come to place
their trust in sentiment, in hope and love: they lean upon women who see
things with the eyes of love. In this they find a certain happiness, and
at all events the secret of strength. No doubt the men of the fifteenth
century did not attach to the idea of number the philosophic importance
given it since their time; it was recognised that in the name of the
rights of intelligence a general should command a whole army, a professor
direct his pupils, a master his workmen; three robbers united against
one honest man, though in the majority, did not appear to have right on
their side; but it is none the less true that intellectual isolation has
always created a situation of difficulty. “The vulgar may judge me as
they please and take me for what they will,” heatedly exclaims Tiphernus,
the professor of whom we have already spoken; “let others please the
multitude! As for me, I pride myself on pleasing two or three.” All the
clever men who speak so eloquently are sure to be in bondage to some
woman; for, after all, the approbation of two or three men, howsoever
intelligent, would not carry them very far, while with the enthusiasm of
two or three women one can at a pinch be satisfied. And thus the work of
civilisation is accomplished; vulgarity, even the vulgarity of common
sense, is hidden under a coating of the ideal, women having a horror of
force, of the law of number, of all that is banal and coarse.
Such was the atmosphere, absolutely new and somewhat overheated, in
which the influence of women developed and flourished. The revolution
was a profound one: hitherto the social system had turned entirely on
the principle of the good and the true, from which a practical and
utilitarian morality was derived. The idea of the beautiful was utterly
mistrusted, and, far from believing in its purifying force, many people
saw in it only a cause of moral enfeeblement. Men had preached a religion
of gloom and manifold observances; it seemed that there was no mean in
life between the virginal precepts of a catechism of Perseverance[5]
and the lowest stages of vice. And now the new generations were no
longer willing to regard earthly happiness as an illusion, nor the love
inculcated by the Gospel as a snare, and flattered themselves on finding
a means of building life upon liberty. A mysticism, compact of snow and
mist, had glorified self-repression, scepticism in regard to earthly
things, the joys of suffering or at least the quest of happiness through
resignation; and its effect had been to raise a select few to a state of
ethereal perfection, and to unloose the mass of mankind to an unbridled
savagery. The moral pendulum had oscillated violently between ether and
mud, mud and ether, a condition of instability like that described by M.
Huysmans to-day.
And on the other hand people wished to live henceforth under a calm and
radiant sky; they talked of taking the gifts of God as they found them,
denying neither body nor soul, but idealising everything. They contented
themselves with affirming the pre-eminence of the soul; apparently the
science of happiness was to consist in abstracting themselves from the
material and the personal and in going straight back to ideas. From that
time it truly belongs to women to govern the higher world, the realm of
sentiment. They will lull the appetites to sleep; they will charm men
of dull burdened soul subdued to earth by daily toil; they will choose
out the refined, the buoyant in soul, to form them into an intellectual
aristocracy: the others will at least be lifted a little above themselves.
The refined are recognised by their thirst for the ideal. At first blush
one might suppose they will be met especially among men of the upper
classes, or at least among men of leisure, for these are fortunate in
being able to look into their own hearts and to follow their own bent,
and in opportunities for gaining impressions. They are not deformed by
drudgery, they have bathed their souls in the great sights of Nature;
the Mediterranean, delicious and bewitching, has cradled them on her
kindly bosom, and has already accomplished for them half of the task by
reflecting the sky in her feminine smile. But no; for lack of discipline,
the idle tend toward sensuality. Consequently, women will address
themselves more especially to the men who can work.
And their scheme will be this. They will interpose, almost like angels,
between heaven and earth; they will love us and we shall love them; they
will gently invert the order of things, so as to make of life a work
of art. They will efface two of the three blind forces which govern
us—Death, Fortune, and Love. If they do not prevent all failures and
weaknesses, they will cheer and comfort them by means of a potent elixir,
obtained from a God of philosophy, like physicians who cure by allopathy.
So many springs are creaking and snapping for want of a drop of oil! they
will pour out that drop. So many noble things lack the sap of life! they
will give them that sap, that vitality, that soul. The sap of love brings
grapes from thorns!
Si l’amour fault, la foy n’est plus chérie;
Si foy périt, l’amour s’en va périe.
Pour ce, les ay en devise liez:
_Amour et foy_.[6]
And thereby the transformation, or at any rate the amelioration, of
the world is to be achieved. Men are not, perhaps, so intractable and
brutal as they pretend; by their own account they would be quite content
to accomplish the journey of life eating and sleeping behind drawn
curtains. We must not believe them. They have shut themselves up in a
bare workshop: throw open the windows, let the sun stream broadly in,
bringing light and warmth and the balmy breath of nature. The effects of
the old system of morality, with its bolts and bars, have been seen only
too often; the loathing of vice, the noble pride of virtue and aesthetic
intelligence are also forces; and they alone can make of our terrible
abode a truly sacred dwelling, open, free, dear to our hearts, the
monument of human affection and of happiness.
Thus, briefly, the conclusion was reached that women can transform
themselves and become the chief element in human society, that of
happiness. Hitherto they had been understudies to their husbands; they
had believed themselves bound to take an interest in the work, ideas,
and tastes of a man, with no other recompense than the satisfaction
derived from a duty done. They had to issue forth like butterflies from
the chrysalis, and to become women full of charm, in order to direct the
affairs which men believed they had in their own hands, and in order to
fascinate, to enfold, to struggle if need be, but without violence or
parade. Then they had to rise a step higher, become objects of love,
propagate love, and bring all things into harmony.
Thanks to these ideas, Italy at the end of the fifteenth century had
taken a marvellous bound towards the beautiful.[7]
Spain likewise had leapt towards chivalry; it was like the raising of
a curtain, so sudden was the change: women, hitherto shut up in their
boudoirs, appeared in all their radiance like goddesses.
France, on the contrary, viewed these new ideas with profound mistrust,
and long rejected them because of their Italian origin. We knew Italy,
but under very false colours; she gloried in rising superior to wealth
and rank, in the importance of women, prelates, and artists in her
life; while we only knew her through merchants and soldiers. Her
bankers established in our towns—“Lombards,” as they were scornfully
called—passed in the eyes of the people for men without a country, for
birds of prey akin to the Jews; our knights, still bewitched by the joys
of their expeditions, spoke carelessly only of a people without weapons
and of defenceless women. The French clergy chimed in with their note
of bitter opposition to Rome. And thus Italy was readily imagined as a
hot-bed of pleasure: but to go there in quest of the philosophic secret
of happiness seemed absurd.
In the intellectual point of view, Italy created a wrong impression
among us through the persons she sent us: professors more or less
broken down,[8] exiles more or less voluntary;[9] impecunious, ravenous,
and pretentious characters,[10] not very philosophic in their attitude
towards their rivals: all those also who rang the changes on the honour
we had had in beating them, the Stoas, Soardis, Equicolas, wonderfully
assiduous in making Louis XII. out to be a second Charlemagne (in those
days Charlemagne was still a Frenchman); Caesar Borgia and his brilliant
retinue, at whose brief passage we looked on in contemptuous unconcern.
Because Caesar Borgia did not take our fancy, or because some of us had
met light women on the highway to Italy, any Italian idea appeared to us
a false one; we shut ourselves up in what Pontanus, Julius II., and other
Italians remaining in Italy called our “barbarism,” and as we plumed
ourselves on our logic, we only abandoned our antagonism to adopt all
the Italian fashions completely and indiscriminately. To that end, Louis
XII. had to oblige by dying, and Francis I. by reigning; so at least
Castiglione, the master of the new school, formally declared after the
accession of Francis. So it actually turned out.
Thus women are queens; they move like fairies. “It is a small thing to
say of a woman that she does not destroy the flowers on which she sets
her foot; she must refresh them. The violets should not droop when she
passes, but burst into flower.”[11]
We do not claim that this system is perfect; our aim is precisely to
examine with the utmost care its strong and its weak points; but it is
certain that, to begin with, by the side of almost all the illustrious
men who then flourished in such numbers, we see the indispensable woman
silhouetting herself, not as tyrant or even director, but as mentor and
guide—as mother, rather, since she brings them forth into the higher
life; or, still better, as light and sun, as reinvigorating, vivifying
warmth: according to the saying of Schiller, “Love is the sun of
Genius.” “Without women,” says Castiglione, “nothing is possible—neither
military courage, nor art, nor poetry, nor music, nor philosophy, nor
even religion: God is only truly seen through them.” This was no new
observation: Solomon had already said the same thing; but we must believe
there were new conclusions to be drawn from it, since men hoped to find
in it the answer to that vexed question of happiness which has been put
in vain since the foundation of the world.
To realise how women transformed themselves, we must follow their example
and open our minds. They had the courage so to do: they looked life
fairly in the face—with their woman’s eyes, it is true, fine, subtle,
and complex; they looked, and often they did not really understand their
own impressions, vivid, and rather strong than clearly defined. Often,
also, under the impulse of these impressions, they acted in the genuine
woman’s way, with tricks and reservations, evading the consequences of
their own theories, going round the obstacle they advanced to attack in
front. Their achievements and thoughts are difficult to determine. We
cannot here, as in an ordinary history, be satisfied with a mere string
of facts; we must play the chemist, analyse these various and complex
elements, and seek to evolve a general formula.
That formula is this: to live, that is, to love life, to attain a mastery
of life without allowing it to crush or dominate us. The attainment
of this result is well worth the trouble of deciphering a few women’s
hearts, even though the handwriting should be less clear than our
ordinary manuscripts. In those days they sincerely studied to love life;
they loved it, rejecting all negations and obstructions, all that
overwhelms and paralyses, scouting death itself! Instead of yielding to
scepticism in regard to things, they wished to push love to the stage
of Stoicism, to lift the heaviest burdens, to gaze upon the star of
consolation which speaks to us of love eternal.
Every woman will begin with her own redemption. She is at first thrown
out into the world while still a child, almost in childish innocence:
very soon rigorous duties, material and oppressive in character, seize
upon her: she is, so to speak, battered and rolled out by very rough
forces—the firm authority of her husband, the idea of obedience, the
trials of motherhood, fruitful in joys, but also in hardships and cares.
Whilst her will is annihilated and enslaved, and her heart often remains
an undiscovered country, she assists with pain and disgust at the
downfall of her flesh—that flesh which has become the abode of pain, a
body of death, to give birth to life.
How is the sudden thrill brought about, turning the dull, torpid larva
into the bright butterfly? How do women succeed in drawing from this
essentially human condition something of the divine, passing from
physical production to spiritual production? These above all are the
questions we must seek to determine.
It must not be expected that we shall present to our readers fair
barristers, or engineers, or professional scholars, still less pedants.
No; these ladies were simply modest women, who took their share in the
humblest duties of everyday life, but discovered, apart from charity in
the material sense, the absolute necessity of another charity, moral
charity for moral and spiritual penury, for those destitute of happiness,
so numerous and found everywhere, even within the walls of the Louvre.
If they accomplished a revolution, it was a peaceful and internal
one. They piled up no barricades, issued no manifestos, launched no
declaration of their rights as women and citizens. Though the laws were
not generally favourable to them, they demanded no amendment of the
laws; the same magistrates continued as in the past to deliver the same
judgments from the same benches, politicians still made their fortunes,
ploughmen still followed the plough, engineers continued to construct
bridges and make roads, notaries to scan the cause-lists. Nothing was
changed, in appearance, in the material course of the world, except that
a moral power had come into being, and that women, like the goddesses of
happiness painted by Nattier, under the cloak of indifference had taken
into their keeping a mysterious urn, whence life seemed to gush in a
spontaneous stream, without the help of judges, engineers, or notaries,
yet continually sending out the current essential to the sweetness and
fruitfulness of the world.
BOOK I. FAMILY LIFE
CHAPTER I
MARRIAGE
There are two ways of dealing with the heart of a woman. You may have
confidence in it, believe in it, regard it as a real element of strength
and happiness, uplift and develop it, touching it then to fine issues
in love, religion, philosophy. These are the lines on which the modern
world proceeds. Or you may treat it as a frail organ of the body, unruly,
incapable of good; you may bind it down, early and with due care, with
all sorts of reasonable chains, the chief of which, marriage, will keep
it fast prisoned, and reduce it to nothingness and oblivion. This, of
course, was the system of former days.
Singularly enough, these two systems, contrary as they are, spring from
precisely the same practical starting-point, which indeed remains the
sole point of contact between them: the principle, namely, that marriage
and love are distinct, and must neither be confused nor blended.
To Battista Spagnuoli of Mantua,[12] poet and monk, in the solitude of
his cloister, marriage shone with a rosy light. Cornelius Agrippa,[13]
with his utilitarian and paradoxical mind, regarded it as a compulsory
conscription of the German type, with no possible exemptions, or almost
none, and fancied that if men would but go in quest of a pretty woman
instead of being so much absorbed with the proprieties and the main
chance, the result would prove far more satisfactory. With the exception
of these two, and a few more or less ingenuous or eccentric people
like them, no one believed in the utility or the possibility of love
in marriage. Caviceo’s romance _Il Peregrino_ was considered sheer
perversity, for after innumerable intrigues and adventures it ends—how?
With wedding bells! So that, according to Caviceo, marriage was to turn
out a romance of cloak and sword![14]
It was universally agreed that no idea could be more absurd, less
practical, more detestable, more immoral even. Marriage was a
transaction, an ‘establishment,’ a business partnership, a grave material
union of interests, rank, and social responsibilities, sanctified by
the close personal association of the partners. To insinuate an idea of
pleasure was to rob it of its noble and honourable character, and to
drag it down into the mire of sensuality. To mingle with it a physical
suggestion was to degrade it; to mingle with it love, the absolute, great
enthusiasms of heart or intellect, was to lay up for oneself disasters,
or at least certain disappointment. “Love-matches turn out badly quite
as often as arranged marriages.” A romance lasts a week, the reality
for a lifetime. No passion can survive the humdrum, the monotony, the
deadweight of matrimonial experience: and what marriage can hold out
against passion? Heart freedom, the storms, raptures, revulsions to be
anticipated on all sides—what amalgamation is possible between these and
the peaceful domestic life which is looked-to to furnish forth a very
solid, united, and well-ordered existence? A certain equality is the
rule of passion: what it demands is a perfect union between two persons
who are mutually attracted and whom there is nothing to keep apart.
What would become of married life under these conditions, without some
directing authority, without one to give law to the other? In regard to
marriage, the time-honoured principle, rigorous though protective, was
this: the husband ought always to take the helm, imbecile, madman or rake
though he be: woman is born to obey, man to command.
Wedlock then is good solid household bread, not by any means cakes and
ale. It is the modest squat suburban villa in which you eat and sleep:
passion is a church-spire piercing the sky—the spire we see high above
our smoky roofs, whence on Sundays and festivals our ears are greeted
with the sound of bells.
To try to import passion into marriage is like trying to pack a cathedral
into one’s bedroom.
And so marriage is to retain its actual character as a simple, natural
function of the physical life, like eating and drinking: the husband a
domestic animal, presented to the woman by the usages of society, the
accident of birth, and the terms of the bargain. There is no reason for
choosing him except in so far as he fulfils these conditions. Do women
choose their family affections? Do they select their father, brother,
relatives? The husband also is a relative, a partner, to whom every
possible duty is owing except that of love. The woman’s duty to him is to
keep house for him, present him with children, nurse him in sickness, and
regard his liberty as sacred.
In short, at whatever point of view one placed oneself, marriage excluded
every idea of personal fancy; indeed, of all the contracts of life,
marriage was the least tolerant of any such idea. Its traditional
character as a business transaction no one would have dreamed of
contesting.
So far as the woman was concerned, the practical consequences of this
principle were very simple. It was not for her to seek a husband, but
merely to accept the man whom fate, that is to say, Providence, had
destined for her. Nothing was more ridiculous than here and there to
find some portionless girl, or one who, like Mademoiselle de Clermont,
was no longer in her first bloom, waxing sentimental and speaking with a
sigh of the “unaccustomed pleasure” of loving the man one married. “This
pleasure,” she says, raising her eyes to heaven like a virgin martyr,
“if it sets at nought human wisdom, is inspired by wisdom from on high;
so fine, so exquisite must it be, that of a truth it is keener than
sorrow at the loss of the loved one—a commonplace and everyday sorrow.”
Whereupon, whatever sympathy may have been inspired by Mademoiselle de
Clermont’s misfortune, her friends cannot help smiling: “So you mean to
say,” they exclaim, “that a woman has more pleasure in the embraces of
her husband than pain at seeing him slain before her eyes!”[15]
The idea that a young girl should submit passively to be married was
almost the only one on which there was complete agreement. Everyone was
thoroughly convinced that in adopting any other course she would almost
invariably be committing a folly sure to bring repentance. If young and
unsophisticated, she would allow herself to be lured and snared by mere
illusions from which there would be a speedy awakening; if she had lost
something of her youth and innocence things were still worse, for then
she inevitably said and thought and did ridiculous things, like poor
foolish Mademoiselle de Clermont. A spinster of twenty-five or thirty,
seized with a yearning for marriage,[16] would be subject to attacks of
mental vertigo springing rather from vanity than from love; one could
believe her capable of the veriest follies and the most surprising
judgments.[17] That was the opinion of all serious women, from Louise
of Savoy to Anne of France,[18] whether they were of matter-of-fact
intellect, spiritual in their affections, or somewhat wayward in their
imagination. The whole mechanism of life exemplified this fundamental
principle: a young girl should have “no choice, ambition, or wish” of her
own; “experience, failing God and the Law, proves to girls the necessity
of discretion, and of not marrying to please themselves; their marriage
should be left to their relatives, or in default of relatives, to their
friends.”[19]
Very frequently, the “best” marriages were negotiated by intermediaries
more or less obliging, relatives or friends. Princes and princesses were
married through the good offices of diplomatists. Indeed, ladies and
gentlemen of the Court did quite a respectable trade in match-making, for
a consideration.
But, after all, the task of marrying his daughter was essentially and
especially one for the father.
For the most part, the father would be only too glad to wash his hands of
the business. In every case he was in a hurry to bring matters to a head,
and believed that in losing no time he was acting in the interests of
his child. She was to belong wholly to another household, since it was a
woman’s lot to belong to her husband, and so it was well for her to enter
upon her new life as early as possible, before she had formed ideas of
her own, and at an age when the paternal household would not yet have
set its stamp indelibly upon her.
In this respect the betrothals, the “marriages for the future”—marriages,
that is, solemnised in infancy for future consummation—were of great
service, and the higher the position occupied in the social scale, the
earlier such marriages were. Kings have even been known to marry their
daughters two days after birth, but such a compact, it is true, was
in the end declared by the lawyers to be immoral and hardly serious.
Indeed, later on, when the time for carrying out the bargain came, some
princes and princesses felt constrained to protest against this arbitrary
disposal of their persons. Happily, such engagements were not of the most
stable kind, and, often enough, political considerations were sufficient
to upset them before any harm was done.[20]
In distinguished families, betrothal was by no means unusual at the age
of two or three. At this tender age Vittoria Colonna[21] was betrothed to
the Marquis of Pescara.
Consummation usually took place at the age of twelve. That was a
favourite age with the husbands; though, according to the best judges,
fifteen was the age when the physical charms were at their best, and
the soul was most malleable—a view dating as far back as Hesiod and
Aristotle. Tiraqueau,[22] the friend of Rabelais, vaunts his exploit in
having wedded a girl of ten. In vain did the French physicians implore
the men in mercy to have a little patience, beseech them to wait at least
until the fourteenth year: they demurred, for it was humiliating for a
father to have a fifteen-year-old daughter on his hands: at sixteen they
would have called it a catastrophe. Champier,[23] one of the gravest of
writers, proposed that after the age of sixteen young women should be
provided with husbands by the State, on the lines of Plato’s system. Some
parents betrayed such haste to get their girls off their hands that they
anticipated the ceremony, handing them over to their husbands-elect on
the strength of a mere promise of fidelity. It happened at Milan, among
the Sforza family, that a mother, becoming apprehensive, refused at the
last moment to part with her daughter on such terms, and the matter ended
where it should properly have begun, in a mutual arrangement, the young
lady being formally placed in charge of her husband to save appearances.
But difficulties like these were always very dangerous. In this case a
dispute arose in regard to the dowry, and blood waxed hot; the bridegroom
broke off the match, and took to wife another girl of the same family, a
child of ten, whom he led off like a horse-dealer returning with a filly
purchased at the fair.
Sometimes, in great families, the girls were married in advance by proxy.
Certain wives grew to womanhood without even making their husbands’
acquaintance.
Urbino is not a great way from Mantua, but the diplomatic agent of Urbino
found it necessary to urge his master, Francesco Maria della Rovere,
a youth of eighteen, to come on a visit to Leonora Gonzaga, whom he
described in the most alluring terms: “If your Excellency saw Madame
Leonora, and the Marquis’s little mare, you would see the two loveliest
things I ever set eyes on. I do not think there is in all Italy anyone
more beautiful or virtuous than Madame, and I am sure no king or prince
in Christendom has a mare to match his Excellency’s.” Ultimately La
Rovere yielded like a lord, and set off incognito to see his wife, a girl
of fourteen years and a half, a merry little creature, pretty, well-bred,
and a pupil of the historian Sigismondo Golfo. She was presented to him
at the palace of Mantua, in the Hall of the Sun. He stepped forward to
greet her, and embraced her in the most correct style; then, on Cardinal
Gonzago remarking loudly that this was a somewhat frigid demonstration,
he went forward again, caught Leonora by the arms and head, and planted a
becoming kiss upon her lips. And then they sat down and began chatting on
the topics of the day, notably a portrait which had just been finished.
To find marriages of mutual affection it would have been necessary to
go down among the lower ranks of the people, in country places; “good
matches were made”[24] as they danced together at the fair or at the
village merry-makings. But in the great world the future spouses were
subjected to a system of “interviews.” Louis de la Trémoille,[25] who
conceived the eccentric idea of escaping the infliction, found no other
means than to introduce himself into the house of his prospective wife,
Gabrielle de Bourbon, disguised and under a false name, as they do in the
comedies. With a widow, perhaps, a little less ceremony may have been
permissible, and then—! In one of his diplomatic despatches Bibbiena[26]
relates with much humour an interview of this sort:
“To-day there took place an interview between the Duke of Calabria and
the divine lady of Forli.[27] Needless to say, his excellency was
admirably groomed and attired in the height of Neapolitan fashion. His
arrival at Bagnara was welcomed with a salute of musketry, and he stayed
to dinner. He spent two hours here with the countess, but it is patent to
everyone that Feo[28] has the lady well under his thumb. His excellency
took his leave very well satisfied; but he was only moderately taken with
the countess: he told me that they joined hands very gingerly, that he
caught some winking and shrugs. And so we are off again, like a cricket
into its hole.”
The final scene was enacted between the bride’s father and the bridegroom
or his parents. It was remarkably like any other sort of bargaining: and
on this subject an old author throws a charming side-light: he urges
paterfamilias to bestow as much care on the choice of a son-in-law as on
the purchase of a dog!
Ah! if the wife is ever to become an instrument of love, there is no
sign of it here! Her father occupies himself with calculations of the
frankest and most practical kind; he has lived long enough to understand
the importance of questions of money or worldly interests, and on this
score is usually more than a match for his son-in-law. It is all very
well for the preachers to extol virtue naked and unadorned! The ideal of
a self-respecting father is an eligible elder son, heir to the paternal
dovecot, a man of leisure, or at any rate a “gentleman,” in other words,
well-connected, moving in good society, with fine friends. Trade he
rather looks down on: he has seen so many failures!—so many substantial
traders have taken to setting up as “merchant gentlemen,” like the
Genoese, and have come to grief! The law, on the other hand, is extremely
popular; in these days there is nothing better than an alliance with a
lawyer. The young man who is waiting for the death of his father to buy
an appointment in the judicature may hold up his head in any company.
Having once come to a decision, the father is at no loss for excellent
reasons both for himself and others. “He plays the guitar well, is
a beautiful dancer, a delightful singer, an excellent writer, a
good-looking decent fellow! He has the promise of a post as Lord High
Whipper-snapper to the King: ’tis a fine thing, a place at Court!
given opportunity and a friend, and your fortune is made.”... “He is
a sensible fellow, keeps a still tongue in his head, answers you only
with nods or Italianate shrugs.”... “Oh! it’s all the same to me. I am a
gentleman myself; here’s to all gentlemen! Zounds! but ’tis expensive,
worse luck! Come now, I’m as good a gentleman as the king. I don’t keep
up his style, to be sure, but, mark you, I hunt when I like, come and
go as I please, bustle about, flog and bawl at and curse my people,
let ’em know I am master; and the hundred or two serfs I have under me
daren’t stir, egad, without my leave.”... “Tut tut! a little less gilt
and a little more gingerbread! My girl marry a lord and then forsooth
go footing it in the mud to canvass Jacks-in-office for a flower-girl’s
corner or some twopenny-ha’penny matter! A fig for your gentlemen!”...
and so on, with endless variations on the same theme of utilitarianism
pure and simple. Perhaps the girl is already smitten with a handsome
officer: no matter, she will have to marry some surveyor from Paris,
especially if he holds a good appointment on the crown lands, because
that provides opportunities of feathering one’s nest. In such matters
the fathers relentlessly enforce their authority, apparently with every
right. The pleadings in a criminal case reveal to us the Biblical
Machiavelism of a well-to-do peasant who had conceived the idea of
getting gratuitous service for ten years from the candidate for his
daughter’s hand and fortune: the period expires, and then the father with
singular bad faith proposes to exact another ten years’ service; but this
time the future son-in-law rebels, and has the misfortune accidentally to
kill his prospective father-in-law, and this brings him before the courts.
The father’s egotism was only equalled by that of the bridegroom elect.
The man who thought of marrying, that is to say, of taking a wife, was a
man of some thirty years (Plato proposed thirty, Aristotle thirty-five);
he had enjoyed his youth, and was now shutting the door upon it. Why?
Often he was not very clear himself: because the time had come, he
supposed, for doing what everybody did. Celibacy was not the vogue: “We
are no longer in the age of the vestals,” as Egnatius[29] excellently
said. And we discover from various sources that the religious vocation
was not very well understood, even among girls. Luckless preachers had
to toil and sweat to prove that virginity was no crime, and that a woman
might quite fittingly prefer the ideal of a mystic marriage to the
prospect of bearing a man’s yoke and measuring out the domestic oil.
Erasmus writing to nuns is too courteous not to speak of angels or lilies
of the valley, but in his heart of hearts he thinks it all terribly
old-fashioned, and has not the slightest belief in the virginal theories
of St. Jerome. With still greater reason, celibacy was not countenanced
beyond a certain age. Luther very honestly regarded it as an intolerable
burden, contrary to nature and the custom of the early church. “It is
as impossible to do without women as without meat and drink.” And so a
man took a wife because he thus fulfilled part of his duty as a healthy
animal; he married because at thirty years the time had come for making
a home and begetting a family. In reality a man married, in a manner,
impersonally, rather for his family than for himself; and all that he
desired was to complicate his life as little as possible in marrying, to
be able to preserve his tastes, habits, hobbies, without the incubus of a
partner.
The worst feature of this business of matrimony was that it was so
entirely at the mercy of chance, which made almost a lottery of it,
and it would have been much more ridiculous for a man than for a woman
to yield to a childish infatuation. The man knew nothing of the girl
he was espousing, either physically or morally. He merely assumed some
likelihood of her resembling her parents, with the result that he devoted
special attention to his prospective mother-in-law; she was the woman
he was wedding. A young woman without relatives to serve as samples and
guarantees was at a discount in the matrimonial market. At the best,
it is always a leap in the dark, something like a step into death; it
is the burial of the past, the first sacrifice of one’s life for the
preservation of the race; the Stoic, says Cardan, knows whereabouts he
is at his marriage and his death. A man’s best course is to take comfort
beforehand, to fix his eyes on the object he aims at, to reflect that the
reason, the mind has no great part in it, and that children are not the
offspring of a woman’s brain.
Moralists had put themselves to much trouble to cheer men along this
difficult road, and to provide them with a series of test questions as an
aid to matrimony. They assured a man that he might be quite easy in mind
if he simply verified eight particulars in regard to the girl he proposed
to marry: physically, her age, health, maternal aptitudes, beauty;
generally, her intelligence, education, family, and dower. Unhappily,
this verification was not easy.
Physically, he could verify nothing but the young lady’s age; for the
rest, the physicians advised him to look to her figure and in general
to choose the best-grown girl; but no one can fail to see how vague
and fallacious was any presumption based on that! True, there were the
attractions of her features to judge by; but those were precisely what
the same moralists urged him to distrust: a serious man, they said, would
never build on that sand. In married life striking beauty is apt to pall,
you come to loathe it, and a pretty woman is rarely clever enough to
bring grist to her husband’s mill—except maybe in trade, when she serves
as a signboard or a trade-mark. Sensible men preferred plainness; it was
only widowers or wealthy dotards who gave themselves as a last resource
the luxury of marrying a pretty woman. Poor souls! they would do better
to think of their rheumatism, their indigestion, the dreadful draughts!
Such a match was that of Madame Dixhomme, a very sprightly young woman
well known in society, who bore the name of an old husband, a shining
light of the Parisian bar, who might have been her father! There is no
help for it. These good patriarchs will listen to no advice, and always
count on coming off well. The world is content to smile, and to look on
their attitude as courageous, not to say heroic.[30]
So much for the physical aspect. In regard to moral principles, there was
one that was firmly established. The man who was bringing himself to the
marrying point was haunted by the spectre of feminine independence; the
terror he felt in anticipation of some enforced sacrifice of his tastes
or whims took possession of him and dominated every other sentiment.
So when he set out in quest of a young wife, he looked for one in his
own rank of society, on his own level, so that she might have nothing
to hope for from him, nothing to cast in his face, that he might owe
her nothing, that she might have no pretext for riding roughshod over
him, but might resign herself quite contentedly to play second fiddle,
regarding this subordination as natural, just as the ivy gladly embraces
the asperities of the wall it is fixed to. The husbands wished their
wives to take pleasure in resignation and to fancy that their woes were
the source of true felicity. The first condition towards attaining this
end was that the ladies should not have a higher, nor even a lower
station in society to look back on.
In a fit of epicurism dashed with respectability you marry your cook,
thinking you are securing careful attentions, a good table, and a warm
bed! Woful mistake! You are wedding a fishwife, who will treat you after
the manner of fishwives, and overwhelm you with coarse abuse: she will
never tire of telling you you are not man enough for her. You would not
find it much more pleasant to marry a woman a little too much above you,
who, at the critical moment, would hold you with an admirable curtain
lecture, and, instead of doing her wifely duty, would discourse to you
for the hundredth time on the splendid matches she had declined, the rage
of her family, your poverty,[31] and so forth.
It is easy to understand with what uneasiness and fatalism all these
considerations, not to mention others, fill the mind of a man who has
reached the age of official paternity. He hesitates long, and makes up
his mind at last with his eyes wide open, knowing that “in the best of
marriages one must expect at least as much pain as pleasure.” Not that
he would maintain that marriage is a mistake for men, but he does think
that “neither joy nor felicity has part or lot in such brutishness.” He
asks advice from one and another, and always runs counter to it. Someone
tells him of a girl with money—she will want to rule the roost; of a
poor girl—she will be a drag; a pretty girl—so much the better for his
neighbours; a plain girl—ugh! that offends his susceptibilities. What
does he want, then? A good manager, a strapping well-built wench: if he
talks of consulting an expert, he is referred to Triboulet![32] He would
much rather have to choose a cow.
It is in this frame of mind that he at last makes his decision. If in
later years he attains to some eminence and is tempted to-write his
memoirs, this business of his marriage will be one of the episodes he
will be able to detail, for his own justification, with perfect composure.
A dispensation of Providence was often necessary to bring him to the
point. This dispensation manifested itself under the most diverse forms.
The learned Tiraqueau, of whom we have already spoken, was struck one
day with the fact that the Greeks and Romans had a very poor opinion
of celibacy, and he culled from Valerius Maximus especially a number
of convincing proofs on this head. Whereupon he crossed the street and
demanded in marriage the young girl who lived opposite; he found that her
name was Marie Cailler, that she was very well-bred, and that her parents
were anxious to get her off their hands. But Tiraqueau was determined
not to suggest a suspicion that a man of his stamp felt a real need of
marriage, and so he dedicated to his father-in-law and to posterity the
unparalleled account of his actual motives.
The hand of Providence was sufficiently revealed in the will of the
parents, or in the cash of an uncle from whom one had expectations, and
who, not having himself taken the trouble to perpetuate his stock, was
determined that the duty should be undertaken by another.
It is curious enough to see Michelangelo in this rôle of the preachifying
uncle. So far as he was concerned, he had long held such peculiar ideas
about marriage that he would have nothing to do with it. At a time
when he had come to years of discretion he worked himself up into a
fine fury of indignation against his brother, who, to put an end to an
old and vexatious law-suit, thought of marrying the daughter of the
opposite party. Later, however, he took it into his head that the name of
Buonarotti must not be allowed to disappear: “the world would not come to
an end, but every living being does his best to preserve his species.”
For this reason his nephew was to marry. But marry whom? Not money, said
the uncle, but a girl of good stock: “to wed a good, well-bred, healthy
woman, is to do a good day’s work,” and to assure peace and quietness at
home.
The idea of a good day’s work did not much take the young man’s fancy:
the prospect of a dowry was more attractive. But the dowry Michelangelo
made himself responsible for, provided they found for him a niece who was
really adaptable and likely to prove a good wife. A match was proposed,
but after dragging on for a time the negotiations fell through, to be
resumed and to fall through again. The uncle was content to give the
nephew a start, and kept himself in the background, though he was all the
time setting the bishop of Arezzo at work in the matter. He knew that
the distinguished people at Florence were at that time in sore pecuniary
straits, a circumstance at which he rejoiced, for it might be expected to
help forward his plans. Ere long, however, the bishop of Arezzo offered a
girl who was no beggar-maid to be wed for charity.
The nephew’s hesitation being at last overcome, he obtained an
introduction to the Guicciardini, one of the principal families of
Florence, rich in the possession of two daughters. All went so well
that the good uncle was soon exchanging excellent letters with the
girl’s father. But on the very first occasion when serious business was
discussed, the bridegroom elect discovered with dismay that the style of
the house, which indicated a respectable fortune, was all a vain show.
Old Guicciardini, excellent man, was very careful to avoid a scandal,
and there and then offered his would-be son-in-law the daughter of one
of his friends the Ridolfi. Kept well posted in these various incidents,
Michelangelo at last became rather bewildered; but to him it mattered
little whether his nephew espoused the Ridolfi or the Guicciardini
provided it was one of the two.
Finally, the nephew wedded the fair Ridolfi in April, 1553, and on
May 20th he poured out all his satisfaction in a letter to his uncle.
Ravished, enchanted, and overflowing with thankfulness, Michelangelo
despatched the promised dowry with a present of jewellery. In April of
the following year a son made his entrance into the world under the name
of Michelangelo Buonarotti; next year another was expected, and a third
the year after. Michelangelo signified his approval by a present of 600
golden crowns (about £2000). That was something like a marriage!
But Raphael, a man of the world, wedded to his independence, took a far
less simple view of the institution. His uncle, a worthy canon, never
spoke to him of a dowry; a stroke of Raphael’s brush was worth a dowry
in itself. Unhappily, the divine poet of maternal love, the exquisite
interpreter of women, weighed and digested the matter like a man of
sense. He does not cease to thank Providence, he says, that he has
refrained from wedding any of the ladies contemplated up to the present.
To-day (1514) he may marry brilliantly if he likes; the choice is open
to him: a cousin of Cardinal St. Maria in Porticu, offered him by the
Cardinal himself—a lovely creature, of good family, with a dower of 3000
crowns, or even more. But “he is in no hurry”; and indeed, that is the
sober truth: men are not in a hurry; and Raphael never married.
So it was quite with the feeling that he was fulfilling an impersonal
and family duty that a man ended by espousing a woman whose attitude was
as impersonal as his own. For the same reason, to consecrate the nuptial
transaction and give it due importance in the eyes of the world, the
marriage was surrounded with an ever-increasing ostentation. The opening
scene was as imposing and brilliant as the subsequent years of married
life were to prove sombre and colourless.
At a later date we find the Calvinists up in arms against these idle
gawds, which they style scandalous worldliness, a “villany.” Nevertheless
there was evidently no idea of glozing over the real character of the
contract; but aesthetic taste, however rudimentary, insisted apparently,
if not on idealising the contract, at least on beautifying it.
Up to the solemn moment everything has been transacted between men.
The young woman appears on this great day for the first time in her
life. If she has been brought up according to the old method, many
people have scarcely suspected her existence. Unlike her husband, who
is taking a step backwards, subsiding from youth into maturity, she
is being born into life. There she is, at the door or under the porch
of the church, standing beside her husband, involuntarily, with no
desires of her own, passive—an offering, as it were, to the race. In
this strong light of publicity she alone seems a little ill at ease,
blushing at the exhibition, agitated at this unknown something which
the rest are so joyfully celebrating. The priest comes down the nave,
just as at funerals, receives the young couple’s whispered “I will,”
sprinkles them lightly as they stand with a little lustral water,
censes them; and then the procession is formed, to wind its way up to
the altar where the nuptial benediction mass will be sung—a long, noisy
procession, ponderous, gothic, all stiff with velvets, monumental stuffs
and gilded draperies; thirty, forty, sometimes three hundred persons,
none but members of the family; but in these circumstances of parade and
pleasure the family becomes extraordinarily multiplied. At the head of
the procession, buried under trappings of superb finery representing a
fortune, the little bride is scarcely visible; she is for all the world
like the clapper of a bell. And verily under that golden robe there is
after all nothing—but a woman.
They leave the church, and there is no crush; the sight attracts only a
few curious folk, a few halt and blind: in those days there was nothing
to draw the overwhelming throng without which no modern marriage is
complete. And the procession crawls on, displaying through the town its
festal finery drawn from ancestral coffers, with a majesty which may
perhaps give the impression of an official pageant, but nowhere indicates
the crowning incident in a love-story. All is significant of a serious,
authentic, arithmetical fact, a practical and substantial fact, a
performance got up for the honour of a family.
It is precisely this which sends a thrill through all who take part
in the ceremony. Under these huge plumes and massive carcanets there
vibrates a delirious but very real joy—the old family joy in pomp and
circumstance, this, too, drawn, as it were, out of the ancestral coffers.
What man is there who, however poverty-stricken he may be, dispenses with
magnificence at his marriage? Perhaps this is the only day—or rather,
the only period, for one is not married in a day—when he will know what
luxury is. There is a truce to care; life shows a countenance all joy and
geniality.
In the rural parts of France the company only rose from table to sit
down again, or to dance under the elms. Deep drinking, love, quarrels,
broad jests, strange customs, such, for instance, as the _jus primae
noctis_, or the drinking-match traditional with the country lads—all
this developed a boisterous gaiety. The bridegroom alone groaned under
it, for among the middle and lower classes it was the correct thing to
invite to one’s wedding as big a crowd as possible. The poor man spent
his time running from fiddler to purveyor, ruining himself in presents
for his friends and the bridesmaids; he was expected to show everyone a
smiling face, to receive his guests, have a word for all, crack jokes, be
at everybody’s beck and call, think of everyone but himself, lucky if at
an odd moment he could snatch a morsel to eat. When night came he had not
even the right of taking his rest; ordeals of every kind lay in wait for
him; and in the morning he was bound to go on laughing, to receive more
visits, and profess himself the happiest fellow in the world. And then
comes the turn of the upholsterers and house-furnishers.
“Happily,” he says, “one doesn’t get married every day.” Divorce will
never number him among its supporters.
Helysenne de Crenne,[33] the great romance-writer, sketches a somewhat
analogous picture of the doings in the great world.
On some fine sunny morning, when the birds are enlivening all things
with song, the groomsmen set out in procession to fetch the bridegroom,
and the bridesmaids to escort the bride. She arrives in a blue robe
adorned with pearls, a diamond coronet on her head. The festivities,
extraordinarily magnificent, last the whole day, concerts and dances
forming part of them; the men hover solicitously about the ladies; some
of them get up a tilting match, ironically inviting the bridegroom to
enter the lists, and his refusal lets loose a flood of pleasantries.
At nightfall the couple are solemnly bedded. At this moment, in France,
the fun is only just beginning. The house seems verily bewitched: not a
bolt catches, not a window but is under a spell; at the most unexpected
moment an avalanche of troublesome visitors bursts into the nuptial
chamber; the couple spring out of bed; the intruders wax hilarious on
the slightest pretext. In her precipitation the bride has perhaps torn
a little rent in her shift; a court is at once constituted to try the
case, and we may imagine the full-flavoured jests that are bandied about,
becoming indeed a little wearisome.
In Italy the marriage was a more solemn and complicated affair. The
law indeed was compelled to intervene with a view to limiting the
expenditure, in spite of which certain Florentine marriages cost
some £20,000, without reckoning the presents—and the presents made a
heavy item. At Venice the witnesses, sometimes numbering forty, could
not escape for less than two hundred ducats apiece. The marriage set
the artistic world in motion. Men of letters came flocking up with
inflictions in the shape of epithalamiums, more or less new, descanting
in Grecian style on the theme “is marriage a necessity?” or farragoes
of pedantry, crammed with allusions to the ancients, full of names like
Lycurgus and Plato, lauding the families of the young couple to the
skies, and comparing the bride and bridegroom to Philip of Macedon,
Mithridates, Dido; eclogues were rained on them, and apologues, and
declamations in Latin verse. All these were printed, and constituted
an authentic memorial of the event. A painter of repute would be
commissioned to decorate the trunk for the brides trousseau; he would
depict on it a story from Scripture or mythology, or a genre scene,[34]
and this formed another memorial, often charming and always worth
keeping.[35]
In the pages of history we find descriptions of so many weddings that
it would be no easy matter to make a selection. King Alfonso of Aragon,
hardly serious as a husband but a very splendid prince, was married
with a magnificence that was long remembered. On the shores of the sea,
the glorious sea of Naples, tables were set up for a company of thirty
thousand, amid fountains running wine and pavilions flashing with light.
In the neighbouring forest a hunt was organised for the Court. The
Neapolitans in their enthusiasm invoked the sun to witness that nothing
more beautiful could ever be seen.
The wedding of Eleanor of Toledo to the Duke of Florence in 1539 is
described with abundant details in a little book compiled for the
occasion. There you may read a description of the triumphal arches, the
statues, the dramatic performances, and find the complete text of the
stanzas, the madrigals and the comedy. The music was printed separately.
One may read also the details given by M. Molmenti of the dazzling
pageants at Venice: the official proclamation in the court of the
Doge’s palace, the prolonged and sumptuous preparations for the festive
entertainments, the canals _en fête_, the façades of the palaces hung
with bunting, the gondoliers in red silk hose skimming the waves,
the armies of servants in gold-embroidered liveries, the bonfires,
the fireworks, the fifers and trumpeters, the serenades, dramatic
performances, balls, banquets with lavish displays of gold plate and
decorations flashing with all the colours of the rainbow—it is all like
a dream; even Veronese would have despaired of painting the thousand
extravagances of this feverish life.
But nowhere do we catch sight of the woman: it is the man who
predominates and plays the leading part. Suddenly the curtain falls. The
girl has become a wife, and then what crudities! what realism! even in
those circles where delicacy is as a rule pushed to the utmost limits of
refinement.
Details on so intimate a matter appear to elude the historian. But though
confidences are lacking, we may surmise the real feelings, the profound
degradation of certain young brides, from the very circumstantial reports
of the ambassadors charged with superintending the arrangements of royal
marriages. These reports, it is true, relate to a very special society,
but it was the highest society, and precisely that which set the fashion.
No one would imagine what singular details are to be found in these
letters.
Take for instance an incident that happened at the charming Court of
Urbino, perhaps the most exquisite of all courts. On the morrow of her
son’s marriage, the Duchess-dowager had the door of the bridal chamber
flung open at dawn, and approaching her daughter-in-law, who bashfully
tried to hide under the bedclothes, said to her: “Well now, my daughter,
isn’t it a fine thing to sleep with the men!” What a compliment from
the Queen of Platonism! No one after this will deny that marriage is
everywhere stamped with the character of unredeemed prose.
That phrase “fine thing” in particular, which on the lips of the duchess
so often denoted the ideal, startles us here with a singular irony.
Or again, what a curious chapter of adventures was that of Bianca
Sforza, who as heiress to an immense fortune had become by proxy the
wife of the Emperor Maximilian! Ambassador Brascha was deputed to the
delicate mission of proceeding to Innsprück to hand the princess over
to her husband, but lo! on arriving they found no one to meet them but
an archduchess. How was he to extricate the lady from this embarrassing
situation?
Brascha wrote to Vienna, striving in the meantime to put a good face on
the matter, giving balls, and so forth.
Maximilian was in no hurry to reply, but wrote at length, asking to see
the ambassador. Brascha set out instantly, taking with him this charming
but singular note:
“Most serene King,
My lord, I find myself under such obligations towards your
Majesty that I am quite dazed at the love you manifest for me.
I could not if I tried express the joy which floods my soul.
Being unable to testify to it sufficiently in writing, I send
Messer Erasmus Brascha to speak on my behalf: and I beseech
your Majesty to believe him, and I commend myself to you.
Innsprück, December 26, 1493.
From Your Majesty’s handmaid,
BLANCA MARIA, with her own hand.”
It was two months before Brascha returned: he was determined not to
return alone. The Emperor was very much occupied: he entertained the
ambassador handsomely, invited him to festivities, waxed eloquent in
praise of the Sforza family, and even mentioned Innsprück with much
urbanity; but all this did not answer the purpose of the unlucky Brascha,
whose exertions, uneasiness, and distress of mind may be imagined. At
last the imperial procession began to move: for Brascha it was a moment
of poignant emotion. Poor Bianca had no prudish reluctance in quitting
Innsprück, where she had been so long eating her heart out, and the
union took place on March 9 at Ala. And on the 10th Brascha wrote, with
a sounding sigh of satisfaction: “At last, thank God, we have got to
the consummation of the marriage, to the confusion of our enemies. I
spent yesterday evening with the king and queen, and we were deep in
conversation up to the time when, the Court having broken up, their
Majesties decided to go to bed.” Brascha was resolved to make quite sure,
continuing for several nights in succession to assure himself. At last he
breathed freely! Ah! such missions as this were no sinecures!
But when the time came for reappearing in public, life glowed with a
new heat and resumed all its exquisite charm. If by some chance a young
bride of princely rank had to cross Italy to rejoin her husband, she saw
along her whole course nothing but demonstrations of joy, smiling faces,
charming freaks of fancy; to give her pleasure these affectionate people
used their one resource—invention. At Milan the poet Bellincione and
Leonardo da Vinci welcomed the young wife of Giovanni Galeazzo in a sort
of firmament, in which animated planets circled round her, loading her
with compliments the while. Plato in his raptest moods never imagined
anything sweeter or lovelier than certain tokens of homage paid by the
Italians to a new sovereign lady. On returning to their domains the Duke
and Duchess of Urbino found, ranged upon a hill-slope, the ladies of
the city exquisitely dressed, and the children bearing olive-branches
in their hands. As soon as the bridal party came in sight a screen of
mounted choristers rose up before them, accompanied by nymphs in antique
garb; dogs started off in pursuit of hares let loose for them; the hills
resounded with the strains of a cantata specially composed; the Goddess
of Mirth in person descended the slope and offered the duchess her
congratulations and good wishes.
These affectionate welcomes, this show of cordiality at least warmed
the sick and sad heart of a young wife, and indicated at the outset her
path of safety. Yes, it was a pious and salutary work to envelop in
an ideal world this timid child of nature who was being consigned to
a lord and master. It would have been barbarous to check this joy in
external things; to show the poor girl from the very first the cutting
of bread-and-butter as the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life; to shut
out from her view all that lends brightness and colour to the world. On
the contrary, thanks to the smiles with which heaven and earth greeted
her, a woman of intelligence and sensibility entered upon her mission
with a stout heart, in the vague anticipation that fortune was bound to
smile upon her still. Where was the harm? There was nothing in her hopes
to prevent her from treading the stoical path of destiny and lending
herself to the material functions that devolved upon her. But her eyes
were opened, she perceived the dawn for her of a life which her husband
had long known. It was now her turn to blossom out; she became conscious
of her soul, and understood that she too was to be entitled to her youth.
CHAPTER II
THE MARRIED WOMAN
“Woman, in my judgment, is the stumbling-block in a man’s career. To love
a woman and yet do anything worth doing is very difficult, and the only
way to escape being reduced by love to a life of idleness is to marry.”
There is nothing new in this reflection, put by Tolstoï into the mouth of
one of his characters.[36] Such was the theory of the Middle Ages—fatal
love! The new-fledged husband was under no illusion in the matter: he
had married to cure himself of love, or rather to have done with it for
ever, to turn from woman and towards higher things; he would never have
imagined any connection between his marital duties and his soul. First
and last, wedlock had no romance for him. Marriage was the worn and dusty
highway of materialities.
Nor did the expectations of the young girl soar any higher. Shown the
simple truth by the solemn personages to whom she owed her upbringing,
sedulously guarded against any kind of illusion, she knew all there was
to know about her new duties, and in regard to these it was thought
peculiarly necessary to arm her against errors and enthusiasms that might
bring disappointments in their train. Marriage she had always looked upon
as a natural function with excellent precedents, and she had studied its
rules, in their rudiments at least, so as to be able to guide her steps
intelligently in a career that had necessarily its technical side.
This was why Champier the physician compiled expressly for Suzanne de
Bourbon—that peerless flower among noble maidens—a little treatise quite
foreign in its nature to what is in these days called “literature for
young people.” Yet it must be confessed that this treatise, frankly
physiological as it is, constituted the best imaginable safeguard against
being swept away on a flood-tide of passion and folly. Champier lays
down, as rigorously as though stating an astronomical law, various rules
for his lady’s guidance in the most intimate relations of wedded life;
prudence, moderation, and regularity are his text, and he gives point to
his precepts by setting against them a menacing array of human ills—gout,
anæmia, dyspepsia, enfeeblement of the sight.[37] Prosing preachers of
this sort, let us add, addressed themselves chiefly to the women, and
their exhortations were felt to be necessary and moral in the extreme.
Marriage being a partnership to perpetuate a stock and beget children,
the wife was naturally expected to accept without wincing the
consequences of the contract—consequences it was as unreasonable to decry
as to extol. All around her she saw reminders of the high sacredness
and dignity of her vocation: genealogical trees spread their vast
ramifications over the walls, and, while invoking the past, gravely,
almost solemnly shaped for her that gigantic note of interrogation in
regard to the future which distinguishes man from the brutes: the whole
taking deeper significance and impressiveness from the emblematic figures
of Wisdom, Honour, Reason, with which some artist had illustrated them.
“Marriage is a holy and religious bond; and the pleasure a man hath of
it should be a moderate, staid, and serious pleasure, and blent somewhat
with severity.”[38] To attach oneself to this pleasure, to make it the
axis of one’s world, would have seemed beneath contempt. By the favour of
Heaven, a wife could still retain her self-respect and become a moral and
religious soul.
On these lines the straight path was marked out: in regard to
circumstances, neither revolt nor rapture; between the two partners,
neither love nor hate, but an amicable understanding, a little stiff
perhaps, and wholly practical. To stray from this path was only to fall
into difficulties and mistakes.
To what extent this wary walking really availed is a question upon
which opinions have always been pretty evenly divided. Marriage was
the time-honoured target at which everyone had a prescriptive right
to discharge the shafts of his wit; for all that, marrying and giving
in marriage proceeded apace, and the institution went on perpetuating
itself imperturbably. It may well be believed that, at an epoch when
conversation, free discussion, and a mania for philosophising were in
vogue, no one lost an opportunity of airing his views on the surprises
and the advantages of wedlock; and indeed it is at this time that we see
the first indication that the shafts of irony were taking effect, and
that the target, after all, was showing signs of wear.
Here, too, there emerges more clearly into view a truth which the reader
will already have seen faintly suggesting itself in the careful and
impartial sketch we have endeavoured to draw of the beginning of life
for women: the truth, namely, that the ascendency of man developed in
him strange principles of egotism. It might be supposed that married
women, handed over, as we have shown, like so many sheep, would pitifully
cry out against their sacrifice, while the husbands would be abundantly
satisfied with the results of a “deal” (if the word may be allowed)
effected at so little cost to themselves. But such was not the case:
humanity is so constituted that, sunk in abject slavery, with no glimpse
of anything beyond, it will hug its chains; while the more freedom it
enjoys, the keener grows its appetite for freedom. So long as we are
sure of a to-morrow, and believe that somehow or other our lot may yet
improve, the present does not count: but, for us to love the present,
the future must stretch out before us into the gloom of the unknown,
and this, no doubt, is why Providence imposes on us the great enigma
of death. So it was with marriage. While the women were content, the
husbands railed at it. Monogamy irritated them. Despite all possible
precautions monogamy almost inevitably endows the wife with a certain
influence. Polygamy alone, in virtue of the classic principle _divide et
impera_, can assure to a husband an undisputed authority, and that is
why, at bottom, to many men who dared not avow it, polygamy appeared the
most natural of luxuries. There are savants, too, who will prove to you
that in many countries it was easy to slacken the marriage bond, turn
it, even, to profitable account; that it was regularly let on lease for
a month or a year. The Babylonians would rather have lent a wife than an
ass.
With women, on the other hand, we remark a resignation springing largely
from the code of perfect realism by which their marriage was regulated.
They find themselves face to face with a fact; what is done cannot be
undone, nor can it be done over again. The transaction is completed: all
that remains is to pay the price. Once they can think themselves quit of
that obligation, the problem of liberty will present itself to them too,
though not, of course, under the forbidding aspects of those ideas of
divorce, remarriage, polygamy, that are floating in the air. In the eyes
of the women marriage kept its character as a sacrament: the view that it
was a contract freely entered into between their husbands and themselves
appeared hard to accept, for several reasons. In the first place, little
faith was put in that system of social contracts of which we are so
enamoured to-day. Life was incomprehensible without a large admixture of
fatalism. We are not, we cannot be, parties to a contract when we come
into the world; but certain laws have already had their way with us, and
to them we continue subject. In marriage, one of those laws, there is
nothing irrational in the accessory notion of a contract, and yet, even
in marriage, with every imaginable liberty of choice, the real substance
of a contract is not found. Is not this contract specially complicated
with latent circumstances of time, place, motive, which act unequally
upon the two parties? In its very nature it involves so much that is
unknown, so much that is fortuitous, admits of so many causes of error
and instability, that it barely comes into the category of reasonable
presumptions, much less of contracts.
Erasmus is astonished that women are still to be found willing to submit
to all the trials of maternity; and indeed it would perhaps have
been difficult to find such women, if, before venturing out upon so
perilous a sea, they had not been able to insure themselves against the
selfishness of men by a high conception of duty, stronger and, above all,
more durable than the idea of a contract. They needed no persuasion to
beware of self-delusion, to contemplate marriage under its most leaden
hues; but yet they wished to retain for it its character as a refuge,
rude but trustworthy. They derided the chimerical theories of Plato on
free union; in short, all things considered, not one of them regretted
having been married in the time-honoured way, since no other means had
yet been discovered of assuring an honourable motherhood. Unions of
policy and position, they very well knew, do not bring about a fusion of
hearts; too often they become “suburbs of hell.” But what is to replace
them? Marriages of passion and love? As a matter of fact, says a caustic
critic, since as mere men we are no longer of any importance, or at
any rate are all of equal value in the eyes of women, the question is
becoming much simpler: a princess will be able to marry after her own
heart, to wed a prince, or a peasant, as there is not a pin to choose
between them. Where is the advantage? retorts a sage: love matches
turn out as ill as the others. The only philosophy of marriage which
women must cling to is that in this matter there is no philosophy. It
is useless to attempt to sublimate it; what they have to do is to make
the best they can of it, and satisfy themselves with a sort of virtuous
affection, in accordance with the unfathomable designs of Providence.
“Marriage,” says Margaret of France,[39] “should not admit of any
objective either of pleasure or of self-interest: all the same, it is not
a perfect state; let us be satisfied with wisely accepting it for what it
is, a make-shift, but reputable.”[40]
Thus the conclusion to which women tend to arrive in their cogitations
on married life—and who have a better right to cogitate?—is that though
they may submit to a husband, they no longer think themselves bound to
adapt themselves to him, to identify themselves with him at every moment
and in every caprice, or to worship this fellow-mortal with the same
superstitious veneration as of yore. They see him as he is, a man, with
certain qualities, human, in the nature of things, and certain defects,
naturally far from divine: a physical creditor, whose claim they do not
contest, but are well able to measure.
At the risk of appearing rash in a matter wherein mathematical proofs are
so difficult to produce, we think we are justified in asserting that the
majority of married women (we are speaking of women of position) desired
to render their physical subjection as light as possible, regarding this
obligation almost as the seamy side of life, an error of Providence.
And they had so much the better of the position that, as rumours of the
little domestic dramas always got abroad sooner or later, the ladies
were almost certain to have the laughers on their side, especially in
France. The French refused all rights to the married woman, but they
always took her part, even when she was in the wrong, precisely because,
as they looked at marriage, the husband represented the government and
the wife the opposition. Domestic squabbles fed the stage, furnishing
certain types which were very popular—to wit, the man who married too
young, or the man who married too old, the latter a special favourite
since the time when good King Louis XII., sacrificing himself to a
dynastic ambition, espoused the lady he called his “torment.” The
husband’s part, then, is in truth difficult enough to play. If he is
intellectual, platonic, there is no pity for him, people are all so busy
finding excuses for his wife. In regard, also, to a husband who puffs and
blows and is irritably jealous, the “new right” grants to the wife the
fullest absolution. Everyone knows that a silk dress is not enough for
happiness!—and because a husband is pleased to be deaf or blind, it is
not to be expected that the whole world is to be blind and deaf too.
On her side, a wife had the right to stand on her dignity and play the
prude. In general, the average worthy man, a little vulgar perhaps, but
a good father and an excellent man of business, is not a great success
in his domestic relations, and in insisting on what he regards as his
wife’s mission, the bearing of children, he wofully deceives himself. My
lady’s mission is to be the lady of the house: as for him, let him go to
his office and “think himself too much honoured that God has blessed
him with such a wife.” If it is a question of receiving fine fashionable
friends, people from Court, madam has incomparable graces; but any tender
approaches on the good man’s part are sure to bring on a fit of the
megrims.
There were a multitude of good, excellent marriages which were only half
marriages. Appearances were saved in the eyes of the world, and even in
the eyes of the married couple themselves; they both had the good taste
to drift along without undue strain, gathering merely the natural fruits
of their association. Both enjoyed their liberty: the wife was unmolested
and her own mistress; the husband travelled, sailed the seas, or went on
embassies, striking up flirtations in his progress from court to court,
and doing his household honour by his successes. Castiglione,[41] a
perfect type of the man of the world, saw his wife at intervals, and was
always on the best of terms with her; evidently it never occurred to him
to take her about with him, but he always showed her in the most delicate
manner how much he valued her. At Rome he amused himself by putting into
verse a letter he was addressing to her. It was at Rome, too, in August
1520, that he learnt of her death in giving birth to a daughter; just
before she died the tender-hearted woman mustered strength to smile for
the last time, and to dictate one more charming little letter.[42]
Montaigne has a good deal of pity for the women who were subjected to
these capricious humours: “They are verily in worse condition than
maids and widows. We want them at the same time hot and cold.” He does
not remark that, for some reason or other—disgust of too pronounced
a materialism, longing for peace and quietness, coquetry, scorn of
sensuality, or what not—the majority of women only accepted wifehood for
the sake of motherhood, and would be more than satisfied if they could
be virgin-mothers; some considered themselves almost as idols sacred
from human touch. Pope Alexander VI., for all his humour and his nimble
wit, was very far from understanding all these refinements, and this
singular loathing of the flesh. In 1502 he expressed himself pithily and
forcibly, but vainly, about the amusing opposition of the Duchess of
Urbino, who, when she was offered urgent and incontestable reasons for
the annulment of her marriage,[43] absolutely refused to exchange her
husband for a French husband of unimpaired vigour, whilst the duke, the
cause of this contention, accepted a cardinal’s hat. Laugh as Alexander
might, with all his keen sense of humour, at what he called “fraternal
magnanimity,” this simple incident at Urbino contained the germ of an
entirely new code. Other ladies carried the sentiment of ‘fraternity’ to
preposterous lengths. Paul Jove[44] himself, who belonged body and soul
to the philosophic world, gives vent to his feelings when he records the
remarkable feat of Julia Gonzaga, Countess of Fondi, who was left a widow
after many years of marriage without having ever yielded on the essential
point. Marriage so understood becomes a mere matter of policy or business.
We have no wish to dilate on this delicate problem of bodily
emancipation; but it so constantly comes before us, and it is especially
of such vast importance in regard to the further development of the ideas
current in society, that it is hardly possible to avoid doing so. The
preachers, who at one time had ardently urged the severing of family ties
as inexorably demanded by religion, are now seen proclaiming from their
pulpits, with the same appeal to religion, a totally different doctrine,
and inculcating mortification of the flesh of quite a novel kind. We
know the story of an excellent pharmacist of Pau “who never had anything
to do with his wife except in Holy Week,[45] by way of penance.” Even
in remote country places it became the vogue to occupy separate rooms.
There was no attempt at disguising the fact, and a good deal of joking
on this casuistical refinement went on in polite circles. It was one of
the points on which Henri d’Albret was not backward in rallying his wife
Margaret. She flung back the half-laughing, half-angry retort: “Henri,
perhaps the lady whom you think so much to be pitied might find some
solace if she pleased. But let us dismiss the pastimes in which only two
can share, and speak of what should be common to all.” Then Henri, taking
as was proper a higher tone above these trivialities, addresses humanity
at large: “Since my wife has caught so well the drift of my remark, and
takes no pleasure in a pastime for the individual.... I give in.”[46]
We have often read the eulogies on Margaret of France, sister of Francis
I., and the compliments paid to her conjugal virtue. There is no reason
to gainsay them, but it is well to note of what stuff her virtue was
made. Henri II. could write: “Without me, she would never have returned
with her husband.” And, in truth, she made no secret of it.
One day when someone was relating a scandalous freak on the part of a
faithless husband, Henri d’Albret said to her with affected tenderness:
“I assure you that I shall never undertake so great or so difficult an
enterprise. I shall not have spent my day badly if I succeed in making
you happy.” And Margaret made the somewhat dry and aesthetic reply: “If
mutual love does not satisfy the heart, all else will fail to do so.”
Towards the end of a certain December the Princess happened to be a
little out of sorts; whereupon she wrote boldly to her brother: “I got
this on St. Firmin’s day (September 25), as likely as not.” This recalls
a certain bet that M. de la Rochepot made with Queen Eleanor, wife of
Francis I. La Rochepot maintained that the queen was drawing the long
bow—that she was not really so free with her favours as she gave people
to understand. However, he forbore like a gallant gentleman to insist,
and surrendered to the contrary testimony of men who had the best reasons
for knowing.
But now, in the midst of this cold, nicely balanced existence, or these
serious misunderstandings even, a heavy blow falls suddenly in the shape
of illness: the husband is struck down. Instantly a change comes over
everything. Womanly kindness gushes forth as from a natural spring. The
wife’s concern is still, as is always the case in matrimonial questions,
only with the bodily realm, but the soul breaks through. For the first
time the wife asserts herself, less perhaps out of affection for a man
from whom only yesterday she held aloof, than in obedience to a natural
instinct for combatting material things, pain and disease. Differences
of temperament, character, position, philosophical views, all drop out
of sight: sensibility alone shines forth triumphant. The house is in
commotion, messengers scour the country in search of distant physicians,
the chaplain sets off to arrange for masses and votive candles. See,
at the bedside of Pierre de Bourbon, the great Anne of France, once
the haughty regent of the kingdom, now fixing her eyes steadfastly on
the sick man, taking no rest day or night, declining aid from anyone,
measuring out potions and remedies with her own hand, administering the
doses herself, warming the bed, doing for the patient little offices of
infinite delicacy without a touch of constraint; an eye-witness goes so
far as to say that she “made it her delight.” The wedded wife is not a
love-sick girl, a scribbler of verses; she has no need of imagination,
of airs and graces, of enthusiasm: here she is seen in all her grave
nobility. She is a sister of mercy. The woman who could not pardon a
cross-grained husband resigns herself without hesitation to a future of
poultices, cooling draughts, and rheumatism. Some there are who endure
this lot for long years without flagging, some who encounter it at the
very outset of their married life. It is their natural vocation.
The attraction exercised on women by suffering is one of the most
singular phenomena in the realm of psychology. It is as evident as the
attraction of the magnet for iron. Women are born nurses and doctors,
with a passion for tending the sick, for dedicating themselves with all
their wealth of tenderness, for devoting their delicate fingers to the
binding up of wounds. Between this passion and the passion of love there
is an intimate relationship; in both is involved the bestowing of life on
man; but in this case the problem is very simple, presenting none of the
moral complications of love. Matter-of-fact and practical women are not
the least strongly convinced of the vocation of their sex for medicine.
So general was the impression in regard to this that a certain pious
author advised that the doors of the medical school should be thrown open
freely to women, that they should be taught all that men were taught,
indeed a little more (Greek and Arabic), and that they should then be
sent off to the Holy Land to aid in the conversion of the infidels.
But why not keep in France women so well-instructed? The reader no doubt
has an inkling of the reason: the physicians are to be reckoned with,
jealous guardians of their monopoly, already exasperated against the
surgeons, apothecaries, and women, “nonentities,” who are meddling with
the care of the children. They are masculine, these physicians, men to
their finger-tips: to kill, or at any rate to physic one’s fellows, one
must needs wear breeches. “The woman who meddles with our trade is a
silly creature.”
Women did meddle with it, nevertheless, out of devotion, and above all
out of self-respect. And on this matter we must take note of ideas
absolutely the reverse of those which prevail to-day.
To women it would have appeared the deepest humiliation and the basest
servitude to depend on men for the thousand intimate and special
attentions which they so often found necessary in regard to their health.
Undoubtedly they held that modesty is to some extent a relative term, and
that “intentions” count for something in it. So they willingly permitted
all sorts of friendly, spontaneous, personal familiarities, so long as
they were in good taste; but even when sick and suffering they were
determined to remain women; and the idea of surrendering their womanhood,
of passing like cattle under the hands and eyes of a horse-doctor on
the mere pretext that the modesty of a girl or a woman is a remnant of
savagery, and that all stand-offishness in this respect appears almost an
insult towards a practitioner, did not strike them as a matter of course;
they repudiated it absolutely; and, moreover, the Roman, Greek, and
Arabic ideas, then so fashionable, strengthened their resistance.
So far from believing that a man had more rights because he was paid, or
because his senses had become deadened by constant wear and tear, they
regarded both these circumstances as adding to their humiliation and
confusion. For their special maladies they had recourse to women only,
and the very fact that in such cases physical pain is complicated with
moral pain and weariness of soul, led women of the world, great ladies,
to take up a work of charity of real delicacy and refinement, to devote
themselves to a thorough study of this class of maladies, so that they
might spare their sisters the unpleasantness of mercenary attentions.
Nothing could be more gracious or more natural.
Science at this period was science, and a man was a man. He was as much
entitled to study medicine, and to practise it, even without a diploma,
as to study any other branch of knowledge—history, mathematics, or
chemistry. To have dragged out a few years on the benches of a school is
assuredly not a bad means of learning, but it is not the only one, and
it ought not to be regarded as warranting for the rest of a man’s life
a positive presumption of his universal knowledge and impeccability. In
medicine, as in other things, so-called amateurs[47] have been known
occasionally to bear the palm over professionals. Now, what science can
women more naturally cultivate, what answers better to their requirements
in regard to refinement and equality, what more legitimately emancipates
them? The practice of medicine was their first conquest, the “great
charter” of their freedom. A number of women, particularly women of
distinction who had charitable hearts and leisure for study, in a certain
sense practised medicine. A celebrated savant, while gently expressing
his regret, dedicated to Diana of Poitiers,[48] as to a colleague, with a
thousand professions of scientific esteem, a treatise on the diseases of
women.
Except that they watched for the propitious moment for regaining the
upper hand, the physicians gave in; they left the patient in the
hands of a woman, contenting themselves with writing a prescription
on the particulars reported to them, thus securing at least formal
recognition—and their fees. Even from professorial chairs medicine was
extolled as a lovely and philosophic thing; and in an official ceremony
at Paris a “prince of science” (to adopt a modern term) declared to a
large audience that Nature has a certain feminine complexion, that she
has been specially bountiful to women and endowed them more highly than
men.
It should be remarked that if the physicians had the good sense not to
quarrel with the formidable power of women, but to come to terms, that
result was probably due to the fact that they were themselves in the
throes of a crisis which could not but inspire them with great prudence.
People were up in arms against them; they were no longer content with
rehashing stale jokes;[49] the sick expected to be cured. Further,
complete discord reigned in the scientific world; men vied with each
other in flinging about opprobrious epithets like “fool,” “mountebank,”
and “specialist.” Paris remained faithful to the traditional and
philosophic spirit, while Paracelsus burnt the works of Galen and
Avicenna. Many men dismissed medicine as a purely empirical science with
no theory behind it, and capable of being mastered in six months. The
activity in scientific circles only added to the intellectual confusion.
Opinion went so far as to hold doctors responsible for their actions, and
to maintain that their repute should be strictly proportionate to their
merits.[50] There were not wanting sceptics, even among women. Margaret
of France, in one of her comedies, brings on the scene a sick man who,
after being tossed about like a shuttlecock between his doctor and his
wife, is ultimately cured through the prayers of the cook.
Nevertheless, a real bond of friendship and brotherhood was in most
cases established between the lady and this stranger who called himself
a doctor. It was a sort of domestic and personal intimacy. Women, as we
all know, are greatly in need of a directing authority; they love also
to be made much of, as certain doctors understood wonderfully well;
like that doctor who never met a woman without attempting to worm out
of her some confidences as to her health, and when someone expressed
his astonishment, “Aha!” said he, waggling his head, “even well-corked
bottles sometimes have cracks.” In reality, he fancied that his
solicitude would be highly appreciated.
The doctor who won a lady’s esteem became her friend. He would write to
her asking how she was, and addressing her as “my sweet princess”; if he
learnt of her illness, he flew to her; if she died, he mourned her. His
sentiments sometimes outran his interests; a noble lady died, and among
her effects were found formidable doctor’s bills she had forgotten to
settle. If in special cases there were limits to the confidence patients
placed in their doctor’s skill, there remained still a vast enough field
for private friendship, which lent itself only too well to scandal.
Official recommendations to hold medicine in respect “on account of
its necessity” came from the pulpit. Priests and doctors gave each
other mutual support and divided the empire between them.[51] Scholars
unearthed the old story of a medical student who bore himself like
an angel while attending an Aspasia. But in spite of these little
testimonials, ill-natured folk like Ronsard, Brantôme and others
continued with more or less virtuous indignation to make doctors their
butt. Dolce[52] amuses himself by relating the misadventure of a young
husband, who, having confided to his physician his intense longing to
become a father, was ere long lodging with the courts a complaint that
he had too speedily obtained his wish. The public was always ready to
laugh at stories of this kind. Medical science was often considered as
an instrument of corruption. Champier, who practised at Lyons, in good
set terms accuses his fellow-physicians of becoming veritable agents of
demoralisation, and of perverting their patients’ moral sense.
So far as medicine was concerned, women showed a becoming modesty in
their ambition. Many medical women were women of the old school, who
acknowledged the superiority of men. They confined themselves to a
well-defined field of study. As soon as she marries, a woman will join
battle with sickness; by and by she will have children to take care of,
then it will be her duty to preserve her beauty and charms. Here is
a medical field well marked out for her. On other points she remains
subordinate to men, leaving to them in particular all lofty speculations.
An eminent, if not the foremost place in the medicine of the schools
was then held by astrology, to which the physicians, wise in their
generation, owed a great part of their prestige.[53] Assuredly it was
not hard to believe, with Plato and the Christian church, that the
universe does not end with man, and that above us there is a hierarchy of
supernatural beings, imperceptible to our senses, on whom we depend, and
whose wings sometimes seem to brush us as they pass: those beings whom
Ronsard has invoked, in verses of so much beauty, as witnesses of his
love:
Ailés démons, qui tenez de la terre
Et du haut ciel justement le milieu,
Postes divins, divins postes de Dieu.[54]
Many physicians held that the noblest part of their art consisted
in penetrating if possible the mystery of the influence of these
supernatural forces.
Further, how could they but discover, even in the natural order of
material things, a universal harmony, intimate relations between the
health of women and the ocean tides and the revolutions of the heavens, a
thousand bonds—
D’innombrables liens, frêles et douloureux,
Qui vont dans l’univers entier de l’âme aux choses.[55]
as M. Sully-Prudhomme sings? People who had lost all belief in the saints
had in those days the strongest faith in heaven and the stars. They
believed readily enough that though the spirit, coming from God, is
free, the vile physical body depends wholly on the stars—
Aux corps vous donnez vostre loy,
Comme un potier à son argile.[56]
These celestial torches govern the universe. In vain man struggles,
suffers, battles, strains all his powers; he is in the grip of a
mysterious destiny.
Ainsi vous plaist, estoilles!...
En vain l’homme de sa prière
Vous tourmente soir et matin;
Il est traîné par son destin,
Comme est un flot de la rivière.[57]
—_Ronsard._
Women, particularly sensitive to the mystery of things, could not close
their ears against such lofty scientific preoccupations. Renée of France
implores the aid of the stars. Margaret exclaims, “their effects are felt
in human bodies.” Yet the surrender was not complete, as one might be
disposed to expect: it is a very remarkable fact that in spite of their
natural impressibility and their genius for imaginative flights, they did
not readily ascribe to medicine so supernal a glory. To them medicine was
a science of the earth earthy, a practical and experimental science. The
only metaphysical principle they associated with it came from without;
and that was, charity.
On the other hand they were wonderfully credulous.[58] One of their
passions was to collect strange exotic recipes of any and every kind.
Catherine Sforza, statesman as she was, spent hours in a private
laboratory, receiving a Jewess who had brought her a universal salve, or
verifying formulae for a celestial water, a cerebrine made of the marrow
of an ass, a magnet intended to compose family squabbles, and a thousand
other prescriptions of like virtue. One of her ambassadors sends her
a drug chiefly compounded of eggs and saffron, of which he sings the
virtues with a frenzy of enthusiasm: “I wish to be present when you test
it.... I would not change places with the King of France, so happy am I
in contemplating so admirable a thing; and besides, your Excellency would
not find another man like me: for courage is required, not to be afraid
of spirits; faith, to believe; secrecy, to betray nothing; and, finally,
you need the instruments that I have; the Universities of Bologna,
Ferrara, Paris, and Rome possess nothing like them.” At the very moment
of going to war Catherine does not forget to write an order for the jars
she needs for her experiments. Nevertheless, in all these strings of
formulae, often so puerile and collected for collecting’s sake, we detect
more than a collector’s mania: we cannot but see in them the thirst for
the unknown—an attempt to pierce the impenetrable beyond. This effort, it
may be admitted, was not very scientific. But was that of the most highly
accredited physician any more so? Women accepted the doctrine that the
sun governed the heart and nerves, Jupiter the liver, and Venus the rest
of the organism; but they were superior to it in so far as they drew no
conclusion from it, making hygiene their chief aim, and limiting their
ambition to the preservation of health and youthfulness.
In this respect they were successful; women have rarely been known
to retain their beauty in so much freshness up to an advanced age as
these women of the first years of the sixteenth century. Their activity
was unceasing, they drank deep of life, but never to excess: therein
lay their great secret—a secret that was simplicity itself, and of
inestimable value, as the next generation was to find when, by dint of
defying nature, by crushing themselves under busks and baubles, exposing
the bosom, turning night into day, or carrying everything to extremes,
the world became peopled with pale-faced, forbidding, white-lipped
women. Ere long a cruel procession of maladies appeared—nervous attacks,
fits of hysteria, stabbing pains at the heart, agonising births of puny
creatures—signalising the return of neurasthenia, which had seemed
buried, but which was to revive in triumph, and for which no other
remedies were to be found than a return to the life of nature, fresh
air, repose, renunciation of the habits of the fashionable world,
uninterrupted vegetation.
In brief, the woman whom marriage has started upon a physiological career
is bent on defending her body and remaining her own mistress, in face of
her husband, her physician—the whole world.
She has her work cut out for her. Further, she is beset under various
forms by an irruption of materialities, which would speedily overwhelm
her if she did not know how to cope with them. She has still to govern
the household, to regulate day by day its eating, drinking, sleeping—the
whole domestic organisation.
Husbands are all alike; it is in great measure to secure a house which
“goes like clockwork,” that they marry. They consider it the most natural
thing in the world for a woman to consecrate herself to rounding off
their life, to yoke herself in unmurmuring submission to thankless tasks,
like the domestic drudge described by Solomon, necessary to the world as
food or light: “She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her
hands.... She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her
household and a portion to her maidens.... She girdeth her loins with
strength.... Strength and honour are her clothing.... Favour is deceitful
and beauty is vain, but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be
praised.”
The preachers take pains to show that she shall indeed be praised, that
her ideal is glorious though her lot will be obscure, and that there is a
happiness in housewifely duty—in feeling that the whole household moves
by her impulse alone. “The wise woman has exalted her house”; on her
wisdom and rectitude has depended the greatness or the decay of a family.
To pull down is the work of fools. The wise build up, and is not to build
up a splendid mission, say the preachers with growing ardour—to build up
happiness for those one loves, and one’s own happiness in this world and
the world to come? “Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain!” Look at this
massive woman, probably happy in her own way, a marvel of plumpness, with
firm-set lips and a look of energy and masterfulness, unpoetic but very
wholesome—this matron of Lotto, blind to all indications that ironical
moonbeams are grimacing behind her; or this superb large-limbed creature,
burdened with a cluster of children, whom Holbein presents to us as
his wife. These good ladies, we may be sure, rise at six and retire at
ten, and from dawn till dark their only aim in life is to take the air,
to go to church, to cook and dust and darn. No Utopia worries them, no
philosophic idea ruffles the calm monotony of their lot.
The majority of French women were sprung from this type in its most
pronounced form, the rural form, and it was practically impossible for
them to alter. In France men of rank almost all belonged to the class of
landed proprietors, and the affairs of these proprietors had been for
several years passing through a crisis. Even if their income were below
the moderate figure of three or four thousand livres,[59] they had to
submit to being eaten out of house and home by a number of traditional
functionaries, while on the other hand the growing needs of luxury and
the depreciation of money seriously embarrassed them. More than one
noble, believing he saw a mine of gold opening in Italy, had joyously
buckled on his sword again, only to return impoverished, if not in debt,
worn out, and soured in temper.
The country squire bore his straitened circumstances with rather an ill
grace. Rubbing shoulders with the peasants (and the humblest peasant was
a lord in his own eyes) and with the village authorities; a determined
foe to Jews, financiers, and monopolists; a democrat, persuaded that all
men are equal, or nearly so; resigned moreover to figure as head of his
village, since a head it was bound to have, but troubling himself very
little about the other social magnates; he shut himself up in his estates
like his father and grandfather before him, among the sons and grandsons
of the people by whom those respectable personages had been surrounded.
He was an excellent man, of bluff manners and healthy appetite,
determined to keep his eldest son waiting for his inheritance as long
as possible, and to disperse the rest of his family, sending the boys
into the Church or the army, and marrying the girls to his neighbours.
He had a grudge against Louis XII. for giving the landed interest
nothing but fair words: Francis I., who multiplied court appointments
and paid handsome salaries, appeared to him the right sort of king for
agriculturists.
That was the kind of man with whom and for whom the majority of the
women of French society lived. At bottom, this husband is an idealist;
he despises money, and plumes himself on the fact with a certain smug
satisfaction; but in his home life he frequently acts as an absolute
realist, a cold-blooded calculator. He will readily and with the utmost
chivalrousness admit that women in general are superior beings, worthy
of much liberty; but he insists on his particular woman remaining on a
lower plane and occupying herself with practical matters. He relinquishes
to her the honour of keeping the accounts, he even authorises her to
negotiate a bargain, or to secure payment of a due, while he himself
hunts, settles disputes among his peasants, potters about, or does
nothing. Montaigne is eager to avow that he has no concern with business;
in his view it is ridiculous and unjust “that the idleness of our
wives should be fostered with our sweat and maintained by our toil.”
He admits in the most liberal manner the right of women to work, and
does so from pure goodness of heart, since women delight in managing,
and a woman who works wants no pity! While Madame de Montaigne is
keeping his accounts, planting, reaping, looking after the masons, her
intellectual husband is good-naturedly gossiping about mankind at large,
or tranquilly contemplating the backs of his books, or dawdling through
Italy, on the principle that travel is the salt of wedlock, poking his
nose into everything on the way, halting at the watering-places, visiting
interesting young ladies; all the time reverencing his wife, oh, so
deeply! He feels that when he returns and finds her among the haymakers,
his love will take a new lease of life: “These interruptions fill me with
a new kind of affection towards mine own people, and make my house so
much pleasanter a place.... I am not ignorant that true amity hath arms
long enough to embrace, to clasp and hold from one corner of the world
unto another.... The Stoics say that there is so great an affinity and
mutual relation between wise men that he who dineth in France feedeth his
companion in Egypt.... If I be at Rome ... I hold, I survey and govern my
house ... I even see my walls, my trees and my rents to grow.”[60]
In those days the direction of a household was an admirable
apprenticeship to philosophy, since it was a point of honour to maintain
a great number of idle people. Thus Madame de la Trémoille had to rule,
feed, and place forty men, four of whom were attached to her personal
service (chaplain, tailor, groom, and steward), and only three women, of
whom one was a nurse.
She had to maintain this retinue and give it a stamp of high
respectability and discipline, which was all the more difficult because
the servants were people of some consequence, there for life, holding
places that had been hereditary for several generations; in other
words, the house belonged to them, in virtue of some indefinable family
collectivism.
Further, people had an ingrained propensity to regard generosity as the
special mark of an aristocrat; and as this virtue was expected to grow in
proportion to rank, it invariably had the drawback of straitening their
means. Out of an enormous total expenditure, Madame de la Trémoille had
at her disposal only two hundred livres for her personal use. A prince
was often worse off than those who lived on his bounty.
Further, this “generosity” did not manifest itself only in money: it
declared itself in affectionate and gracious actions, which after
all involved expense. Thus at Blois no domestic event took place in
the household without the cognizance of the Duchess of Orleans; she
interested herself in the weddings and gave each couple a present:
her children acted as sponsors; she even looked after her servants’
love-children; she watched over the aged; any of her servants or even
of their friends who were in trouble were sure of her sympathy; she
interceded with the king to obtain pardon for a criminal or the remission
of a tax: “You will do both great charity and alms,” she wrote to him,
“and to me a singular pleasure.” Here and there in her modest accounts
there is a little space vacant, importing a surrender of feudal dues to
distressed tenants, a remission of rent, a cancelling of debt.
In the account-books of the leading French families there always occurs
a very suggestive chapter, under the heading of alms. In vain does
the charitable spirit in its shrinking from ostentation draw a veil
over the few lines in which the facts are intentionally summarised.
You breathe in passing an aroma of sweetness, just as in going by
a dead wall you divine, from whiffs of their scent, the roses and
violets on the other side. It was the women’s duty to dispense the
alms, and in so doing they obtained, across the arid waste of material
preoccupations, grand outlooks towards the ideal. A lady of that period
was good from pure goodness of heart; she could let her charity shed
its radiance spontaneously, without effort. She lived in the very heart
of wretchedness: the filthy hovel, instead of shrinking from her sight
and entrenching itself in hateful and inaccessible suburbs, hung upon
the walls of the castle, like a parasitic plant. What woman could shut
her ears against the cries of wretchedness so near? And charity also
was recognised by the State. Louis XII. devoted to it a total of six
thousand livres, which he increased in 1509 by one thousand six hundred
and forty-two livres; and to ensure a more conscientious distribution
he even appointed, in addition to his confessor and almoner, a special
functionary, Jacques Acarie, who received the title of “treasurer of the
offerings, alms, and devotions.”
This fondness for almsgiving the king inherited from his mother, Mary of
Cleves, who was generosity itself. She did not confine herself to the
charitable doles that were traditional, or almost obligatory, such as the
offerings at Easter or All-Hallows: the present of a robe to the “King of
the château” on Twelfth Night; New-Year’s presents to a whole village of
improvised musicians who came deafening her with drums, clarions, carols,
and cries of “_Au guy l’an neuf!_”[61] She went farther afield, to seek
out the poor, and in secret she spent her pin-money in succouring them.
But these private resources were far from inexhaustible. Like many women,
she had a strong predilection for one special work of charity—the care
of women in child-bed. She organised for them a regular supply of food,
besides giving occasional assistance in money or in kind.
She took a personal interest also in the Hospital, and worked with her
own hands in a Dorcas society which she founded, and which distributed
every year in the little town of Blois five hundred shirts and five
hundred dresses.
In addition to all this there was a long list of “good works” in a
more special sense: little dowries of fifty or sixty sous bestowed on
poor girls, who sometimes bore notable names, like “Jeanne the Fair,”
“Lawrence and Jeanne de Saint-Prest”; pensions to needy students; alms
to convents; subscriptions to churches. The family of Joan of Arc had a
special right to the bounty of the faithful: “Perrette de Lys” used to
receive fifty sous “to bring up her own children.”
Truly charity flourished in France, becoming almost a new chivalry.
Certain men of the world became self-constituted alms-collectors for a
convent or nunnery, under the name of its “spiritual friends.”
It cannot be said that France owed anything in this regard to the
example of Italy. The Italians enjoyed large incomes, much larger than
the average Frenchman of ancient and sometimes crippled fortune; but
their expenses were heavier; they had to give fêtes and buy pictures and
villas. Without wishing to exaggerate the significance of an anecdote, it
is curious enough to compare with the excellent practices of the French
Court a characteristic action on the part of Julius II. In the course
of the expedition against Bologna, the Pope was told that one of the
old court servants had just lost his only mule. “What did it die of?”
was the Pope’s curt response. “Of the bad water of Perugia.” “Send the
stud-master to me.” Everyone believed that he was sent for to replace the
defunct mule, but Julius simply said: “Take care they drink nothing but
boiled water.”
Many great charitable schemes were in operation in Italy, where
refinement and compassion were highly developed; but the wealthy people
of Italy had no great love for anonymous almsgiving. This was due, no
doubt, to the fact that poverty bears itself more light-heartedly under
an azure sky. In France, where, unhappily, the stars could not fill
hungry mouths, the old traditions, in spite of the seductions of luxury,
were nobly preserved by the women. Anne of France and Anne of Brittany
both received the nickname of “Mother of Maidens,” in allusion to the
dowerless girls they befriended. Anne of France, who has sometimes been
taxed with avarice, contrived to dispense her benefactions quietly, as
cleverly as others trumpeted theirs. At her expense intelligent children
of the lower classes were kept at their studies until they had taken
their degree; orphans learnt needlework or some trade; widows, cripples,
beggars, poor folk too proud to beg, the broken-hearted, saw unexpected
manna fall from heaven; deserving people were encouraged, sustained,
uplifted, “cherished and nourished” by an unseen providence.[62]
How beautiful, how rare is the art of giving! In our day we see organised
innumerable charitable schemes, “collections” without number, harvests of
good works. But how many people give for love of giving?
Margaret of France, too, like a true princess, was generous, and loved to
do good by stealth. In her anxiety not to appear to curry favour with the
people, she refused—in the blunt phraseology of one of her biographers—to
act “like a mountebank capering on a platform.” “She was wont to say that
kings and princes are not masters and lords of the poor, but only their
ministers.”
The writer of a moral history must needs explore all these sweet recesses
of a woman’s soul, where so mysterious a work is accomplished. Later on
we shall see the women bustling about on the public stage, giving the
world what it demands of them. Here, in the silence of the heart, they
act only for themselves; yet, even from the social standpoint, they
will never do a loftier or more efficacious work. On the rugged path on
which so many of the unhappy are apt to lose their philosophy, is it not
well to spread a soft thick carpet, so that the wayfarers may step more
lightly and be less roughly jolted? This of itself is surely a genuine
work of love, in full accord with the words of Christ: “To her much shall
be forgiven, for she loved much!” From the very outset of their life,
painfully spelling out the meaning of wedlock, women are, almost unknown
to themselves, winging their flight towards the ideal, towards love.
Here, love calls itself charity, that is to say, love for the sick, love
for the poor, love for all who are weak and all who suffer.
CHAPTER III
THE CHILDREN
Their mission as mothers, thanks to the precautions of which we have
spoken, did not weigh very heavily upon the women. The tide was set
against large families; in the country, six children were thought an
enormous encumbrance, and as a rule the higher the rank the smaller
the family. There were not a few houses which had no children at all.
Somewhere in Lombardy, indeed, there was an old law granting exemption
from taxes to families of twelve children, but it did not result in an
embarrassed exchequer.
The physicians questioned on this phenomenon return only evasive
explanations. Placing themselves as they did at a special standpoint,
they held the women more especially responsible, accusing the detestable
experiments some of them indulged in with a view to preserving their
figure, such as drinking water or vinegar, eating sour foods, never
setting foot to ground; or a life at high pressure, well calculated to
develop morbid germs and increase nervous over-excitement; the sort of
St. Vitus’s dance which affects some people; and the thousand other
causes of moral and cerebral derangement. Evidently, in their view,
nothing would be so likely to facilitate motherhood as a life spent in
feeding the pigs and the poultry.
Yet women resign themselves better than men to the trials that a family
brings upon them.
When they first recognise their condition, even those who do not feel
called upon to make too much of their duty heroically accept their lot.
No one pities them; it is natural to them to love children,[63] and if
there are moments of anguish to fear, there are also blissful moments
to look forward to. The husband, on the other hand, is disconsolate; he
regrets everything; he sees in the cold light of reason the consequences
of the event, and his friends agree that he will reap nothing but
worries. A man of fashion collects pictures, antiques, not children.
Some charitable souls suggest that children assure a kind of survival,
are a pledge of immortality, a security for the continuance of the race;
but, for that matter, a much simpler, surer and more comfortable way of
achieving immortality is simply to write a sonnet. Hardly any but poor
drudges, “chestnut eaters,” can afford the luxury of being fruitful and
multiplying, because for them, in their kind of work, with their rigorous
enforcement of paternal authority, a swarm of children represents an
immediate increase of earning-power and tools at very little cost. A
middle-class householder, who loves his ease or is ambitious only to
swell his banking account, has nothing to gain by a large family.
Among the middle class, then, the budding father is the subject of
sincere commiseration. What cares, what vexations will be his! He regards
himself as bound for some time to consider the slightest whim of his wife
as sacred. With a flutter at the heart he hies him to the astrologer to
ascertain at least if it is a boy or a girl; and when the unfeeling stars
announce a girl, he still manages to smile.
One fine day (or fine night, for Nature is whimsical in her choice), see
him, lantern in hand, chilled to the marrow, shivering, running off to
find the nurse; and then what terrible, what wearing hours follow! In
very truth it is he who demands pity, for Providence, having failed to
foresee these moments for the man, has forgotten to give him strength
equal to them. How ardently he wishes it were all over! “There is no
saint in the calendar,” he cries, “but shall have his candle!” The first
wail of the newcomer pours balm on the mother’s heart; but what of the
husband? Can he spare time to admire this shapeless, unsightly little
creature? He seeks nurses for mother and child, he has the room hung with
red, covers the floor with velvet rugs; if by good luck he falls asleep
in a corner, it is only in his dreams to see a spectral balance-sheet
dancing a frantic saraband. No, he has not his wife’s strength.
The red room becomes for the young mother a palace of delight. It was
a charity to visit a relative, friend, or neighbour when recovery was
assured, and very few women would risk losing paradise for such a trifle.
And so the room is never empty. There the lady holds a “regal court,” or
what we, with less enthusiasm, should call a woman’s club. We may fancy
how they chatter, how often the husband is hauled over the coals, how
they cry shame on him. “What! this shabby dress! He wouldn’t give you
this or that? Ah, the old skinflint!”
There prevailed in Italy the very amiable practice of sending all sorts
of little presents—flowers, fruit, trinkets, nicknacks. The young mother
was entitled also to a little tray, painted or chased, of which charming
specimens exist, real works of art. All these presents came in a heap.
With his grave and masculine brush, Domenico Ghirlandajo has depicted for
us a scene at Santa-Maria-Novella: a maidservant is presenting a cordial
on the tray, a friend is amusing herself with the baby, a high-born dame
is making her entry in great dignity, a message-girl is bringing in a
superb basket of fruit. It is a constant stream of visitors, wonderfully
picturesque.
As to the husband, he has disappeared among his occupations and his
worries; he reappears a fortnight later, to return these civilities with
a grand dinner.
The child is to belong to the mother until the eighth year; an exquisite
period in which the heart will expand. It is as she clasps in her arms
this feeble little creature, this messenger from a new world, that a
woman comprehends love; life appears to her all bathed in a mysterious
light, golden, and warm, and glad. All women, whether cultivated or
illiterate, have this sensation.
For some time, perhaps for several years, a mother can thus find the
restfulness that springs from happiness, and, in making all things
minister to her inward joy, she steeps her soul in a felicity to which
she foresees no end.
No woman, then, ought to deprive herself of the first smiles of her
child, his first prattlings, his divine fondlings, which Raphael has
depicted and which Erasmus considered so beautiful a thing that he made
them a theme for rhetorical exercises.
But from the very first the world interposed with tyrannous hand. In old
times a woman had been permitted to nurse her child; suckling constituted
a part of the maternal functions, approved by moralists and physicians.
But now the fashion had changed; the cry of milk-sellers offering milk
for the nursery was added to the morning din in the streets of Paris. The
smaller gentry and even a certain number of country magnates[64] sent
their children out to nurse; and to meet this need, human cattle-rearing
became a recognised agricultural industry, which flourished exceedingly,
though it was rather speculative for those engaged in it, for the
children were sometimes left in settlement of the bill.
In the great houses, or those of middle station, a nurse was employed,
after satisfying moral and medical tests—a stout respectable person
from twenty to thirty years of age. She entered the family, and there
represented the life of nature, occupying, to the end of her days if she
pleased, a privileged situation about her foster-child.
Not infrequently, we must admit, the husband was heartily at one with the
ancient principles, and would very readily have authorised his wife to
dispense with a nurse. But then some fair friend would take him aside and
put him to shame: “What, he actually means to impose that bondage upon
his wife! Does he not see already how worn out she is! Ah, he means to
compel her to it, and we very well know why, the miser! Really, who would
have thought a husband had a soul black enough to inflict such thraldom
on a woman, who, thank God, still possesses some attractions!”
And in that last word there is a world of meaning. A wife of fifteen or
sixteen years, after a year or two of marriage, had every reason to think
that life was not over for her, and that she still had need of her beauty.
Further, etiquette, and in princely houses even politics, intervened:
the convenances were opposed to a mother taking too personal a part in
her children’s upbringing, for in that case it would not have been worth
while to own a whole regiment of servants. There they were, however, and
their allotted functions must be respected; and so the mother had to
limit her solicitude to a careful superintendence.
Nevertheless, many women ventured to set etiquette at defiance. The
Princess of Orange appears just like any other woman when she writes so
joyfully to her sister-in-law, Anne of France, that she has just seen her
“fair niece,” who called her “mummy and daddy,” and “gave her as sweet a
welcome in her little baby-talk as such a baby could.” So, too, Louise
of Savoy, when, in 1520, in the midst of preoccupations of every kind,
she recalls that, thirty-five years before, Francis I. had cut his first
teeth quite unnoticed, “and was not the least little bit ill.”
Up to the age of seven, the children remained under their mother’s
fostering wing, in a pure state of vegetation. Moralists and physicians
taught that they must be allowed to develop freely, without having to
learn anything, and without bothering about anything but good air and a
regular life.
The grand principle of education is to let children grow up of
themselves, alone, unaided, without grand theories, without dogmatism;
and to habituate them to rely on nothing—neither neither fear nor love;
to be themselves; and this from the very earliest infancy. Every being
entering life brings to it his own individuality for development; he has
the free use of his faculties; he observes much, instinctively using eyes
and ears, and his soul reflects his environment like a celestial mirror.
So the mother has only to help him, direct him, set him good examples.
This careful attention in early days appears of capital importance,
because then or never is the time to root up any little weeds one by one
as they appear. No strenuous effort is needed; it is work to be done by a
woman’s hand, gently.
Hitherto it had been imagined that the first thing needful was to secure
a maximum of physical strength, and consequently to harden a child by
means almost cruel, such as an exemplary self-repression, a life in the
open air, freely exposed to all inclemencies of the weather. If a child
wept he was allowed to weep. He was taken sometimes to church, or to see
very near relatives, but never to places of amusement, to the theatre,
or to the houses of the wealthy. To become ever so little accustomed to
comfort, idleness, or an artificial life was considered fatal. People
feared to make a mollycoddle of him, and said to themselves that the army
and the gymnasium in later years would never eradicate ill habits formed
in childhood. They thought only of the children; the mothers were left
out of account.
The women regarded this system as much too severe, and one of the first
results of their influence was its modification. Why martyr the children
under pretext of hardening them? What was the good of exposing them
half naked to the cold, or of making little monks of them, and assuming
towards them the airs of a policeman? Was it so great a crime to show
these poor little creatures some affection, to admit them to some share
with their elders in the life they were bound to know, to form their
minds and their manners by allowing them a place at the card table, or to
give them companions—even at the cost of a black eye?
The old moralists regarded such proceedings as premature and far too
unsystematic, and refused to hear of anything but muscle, maintaining
that entrance into the world always came soon enough. Women were to
divert education into another channel. When they come to gain greater
power in the home, we shall find them demanding the right to love their
children, enter into their concerns, live with them, take pleasure in
them, at least until they attain the classic age of seven.
THE BOYS.
When the seven years were past, a boy became for his mother only an
object of anxiety or tribulation. He came under the direct and exclusive
authority of his father, who aimed at moulding him on large lines and
turning him at fourteen, not into a bookish don, nor perhaps a mere
‘pass-man’ even, but into a man of backbone and individuality, armed at
all points for the battle of life. Our ancestors had a particular horror
of everything resembling enlistment into brigades, reduction to a uniform
pattern. The collegiate system seemed to them detestable, a make-shift
in the worst sense; Louis XI., though he took care to send the princes
of the younger branch to college, just as carefully avoided sending his
son there. College, as Montaigne said, was a “factory of Latinizers,” a
“house of preventive correction,” where men worked like day-labourers
(of that period) fourteen or fifteen hours a day, until their brains
were completely addled and they hated the sight of books; and what, if
you please, was the magnificent result? A smattering of Greek and Latin,
a certain facility in prating about Jupiter, Venus, Pyramus—without too
minute an enquiry, happily, into what those august names stood for. As to
ideas, they did no more than stuff the boys with a few stock notions to
serve for intelligence,[65] instead of vigorously developing the creative
and original faculties.
Thus there was general agreement that college was to be avoided as
much as possible, and that a boy should remain at home. But then came
the tug-of-war. If he remained at home, the mother, who had in all
probability centred precisely on this son all her affection, would
claim him as her care, which is just what the father did not wish; he
mistrusted her, her kindness, her “shows of love.” It was an axiom that
boys must be subjected to thoroughly masculine management, a life of
birching, under the firm hand of the father; the father had a perfect
right to forbid them to see their mother. How could he succeed in
“hardening the soul and the muscles” of a boy, in giving him a physical
and moral robustness depending largely on the “thickness of the skin,”
if the mother was always at hand, interfering, discovering that her son
had been too hot or too cold, petting him, commiserating his slightest
hardships? That was not the way to make a man!
Nowhere was the battle against feminism fought more resolutely than on
this ground. The adversaries of women may be almost infallibly recognised
by this mark, that they insist above all things on keeping in their hands
the education of men, because they regard this as the direction in which
the influence of women is most manifestly fatal.
They fear family life because of the freedom which reigns there, and
because they know nothing worse for a man than a precocious impulse
towards sensibility. “When I was twenty,” growls an old man, “I knew
nothing about women; in these days, infants in arms are further
advanced.” That is a proof, someone will say, of superior intelligence,
a guarantee of their virtue. Not at all. Any system, even college,
was preferred to the education of men by women. From the moment when
tenderness and sympathy become paramount in a house, there is no course
open but to get rid of the boys at any cost.
But is not this to push rigour a little too far, and uselessly to
lacerate the mother’s heart, this aching heart which thought it had at
last found something to fill its void? The mothers are not lacking in
arguments to support their claims. They refuse absolutely to acknowledge
that kindness necessarily spells weakness. Has it not been understood
from time immemorial, by people who could least be suspected of
sentimentalism, how important it is to preserve for a man his refuge in
the affection of his mother? Have not the names of Saint Monica and so
many other devoted mothers always been cited with delight? A rational
education ought not to rely solely on the principle of fear: it should
be the express image of life; and if brutality and coarseness are to
be banished from the world, it will not do to begin by sowing them
broadcast. How many men, nobly fashioned by the hands of women, have
been brought, by means of love’s training alone, to a perfect perception
of authority, reverence, discipline! Affection has a wisdom of its own,
secret agencies of its own; a mother’s heart can see as clearly, and
obtain as many practical results, as the reason and the despotism of
the father. In this, as in other things, force is not everything, and
another regimen is possible than that of the “birch,” or indeed of the
“filliping,” dear to Montaigne.
Margaret of France offers us on this subject a pertinent object-lesson;
she cites herself. Her mother, Louise of Savoy, left a widow, indulged to
the utmost the luxury of freely loving her children. When someone spoke
to her of handing her son over to men, she made answer by installing the
bed of the young Francis in her own room. And the result?
Fille et filz eut, à elle obéyssans,
Rempliz d’esprit, de vertuz et bon sens.[66]
We can understand what deep chords were struck by this dispute between
the fathers and the mothers, and what echoes it set sounding in the
whole life of the women. Separated as they were from their sons by force
of custom, it was natural indeed that, eager to imbue the stern spirit of
men with love and tenderness, they should turn passionately to the love
of their children.
In the first engagement they were often worsted. The son went off
to college. Montaigne deplores it. It is within the four walls of a
class-room, he says, and by doses of Greek syntax, that a young fellow is
to be taught the science of life and given that clear philosophic outlook
which comes through history and experience! What professor will teach
him the wisdom of holding aloof from the world’s Vanity Fair, swarming
with upstart mountebanks and overweening buffoons? His mother would have
liked to extract for him the essence of life, the secret of happiness, to
impart to him the sacred spark of love. But Montaigne is one of those who
regard this as very dangerous; he believes, in short, that “seeing the
world” would be still more fatal than “preventive imprisonment.”
In other cases, the father would select a tutor to train his son, and
then the crisis lay below the surface.
The father always has some hesitation in determining his course. To begin
with, he thinks of the expense, and though enthusiasts represent that
there is no better investment, he knits his brows. Then he would like
to find a perfect man: a difficult matter. As a rule, he decides on the
recommendation of friends, who have seen their nominee at work, and are
loud in praise of his tact, his manner, his method, his knowledge; they
do not explain that their man finds it necessary to expatriate himself,
but he is still young (thirty or thirty-five), and is anxious to make a
position.
The candidate himself takes up his pen to speak with becoming modesty
of his humble accomplishments. He promises to ride out with his pupil,
and “engage in any other exercise that may be desired”; all that he asks
is that he may sleep outside the château and not have to dine in the
kitchen, like some of his colleagues. This is not enough for the anxious
mother; she would like to know if he is a man of honour and a gentleman.
Her mind is set at rest.
For a long time these tutors maintained a certain attitude of reserve.
In his _Calandra_, Bibbiena gives an example of one who is completely
uninteresting, speaking, acting, and dressing like the rest of men. But
these young fellows were men, and what is more, men of education, not
so foolish as, after tasting of a life of refinement, to fail long to
recognise its advantages. Sometimes, under a guileless demeanour, they
suffered temptations the reverse of philosophic: Vegio[67] calls them,
without mincing matters, “abominable bucks.” They learnt by experience
how hard it is to get on by zeal and earnestness, and how easy by other
means. They cultivated literature to some purpose. No one thought any
the worse of Antony de la Salle, the austere tutor of the house of Anjou
in the 15th century, for writing _The Fifteen Joys of Marriage_ or _The
Hundred Novels_, or of Lemaire’s[68] notion of elevating the ideas of
the young Charles V. by offering him delicate nourishment in the shape
of a _Judgment of Paris_ of photographic realism—a picture of the future
reserved by heaven for princes and the great ones of the earth. Such
things were read: dissertations on Aristotle were not.
In proportion as the women posed as patrons of literature, the tutor type
appears in higher relief. The torrent of invective let loose against
them leaves no room for doubt that the tutors had red-letter days.
The dramatists and the writers of novels do not condone the airs of
proprietorship they assumed in regard to mothers or cousins. They show
you a poor devil of a pedagogue, a dried-up anatomy, void of personal
merit, ill-featured, grotesque, boorish, dying for love of some fair,
rich and distinguished girl, whom he pesters with glowing love-letters,
or with sonnets spiced with epicureanism. What peals of laughter there
are when he, like many others, comes in due course to taste the rod in
pickle!
From the moment when Aretino, in his _Marescalco_, which appeared in
1533, revealed the dramatic possibilities of such a part, the type was
fixed.
Before the tutor appears on the scene you know what you are going to
see: a spectacled pedant, ungainly, loutish, pretentious, a twaddling
bore, full of philology and quotations. His very features have acquired a
mechanical cast betraying his habit of holding forth on the obvious, as
Montaigne says, or of extinguishing youth by his stupidity, his “hoggish
wisdom,” to adopt the words of Rabelais.
Then, in virtue of a law of fate, the glory of the tutor waned and
fell. The impulse that went forth towards liberal studies brought so
many rivals into the field that, unless he opened a private seminary or
obtained a professorial chair, the tutor was ruined. His salary became
diminutive, and, as we know, the man who is poorly paid is thought little
of. He may take all the pains imaginable, set impositions, rap knuckles,
pull ears, but no one is satisfied.
“I know no worse blockhead in the world than the scholar, except it be
the pedant.”
And then the poor “pedant,” full of gall and bitterness, withdraws into
his shell. After a long day of toil and drudgery, his only pleasure in
life is to get back to his solitary room, and there spend the night in
collating notes, collecting rare phrases, happy turns of expression, or
hammering out verses, love poems addressed to a beauty whom luckily he
does not know, or lyrical verses at a white heat of passion. And these
productions of his heart (such of them, at least, as Fortune has deigned
to preserve) lie to this day, bundles of them, in the dust of archives.
Needless to add that the tutor considers himself martyred by the father.
The father, who does not profess to love him, treats him indeed, more or
less openly, as a tradesman and a nuisance, and interferes when the whim
takes him, finding fault with this and that—the boy’s talkativeness, his
pranks, his bad companions. He would like on the one hand less severity,
on the other more progress. And then this youngster, who calls him “Sir,”
and whom he always regards as a child, assumes mannish ways and threatens
to follow at his heels: another serious drain upon his purse! Besides,
what is the good of so many courses of study, of this “bookish swagger”?
Can’t he learn everything without such a fuss? What, here is a child we
are going to launch into actual life, and you stuff him with syllogisms,
dates, a world of mere lumber! Did Alexander the Great learn all these
things? He had, grant you, a tutor named Aristotle; ay, and with a few
good moral principles for his whole kit he conquered the world! True,
he respected the arts and sciences, he praised their “excellence and
elegance,” but was he ever seen to grow pale and bite his nails over a
problem in dialectics? No, indeed![69]
The tutors were never safe from these annoyances, except perhaps in the
houses of princes or kings, because then they were important personages,
high functionaries, and a numerous body.
The mother, on the contrary, made herself the friend of the tutor, and
by this means exercised a perceptible influence upon him. She surrounded
him with affectionate attentions. They were two natural allies, two
feeble and down-trodden creatures who sought support in high communings
which the husband did not understand. As a man of culture the tutor leant
towards feminism, and he tasted doubly, for himself and for his pupil,
the attentions, the solicitous benevolence, which a mother throws about
the work of education. The palace of Louise of Savoy at Amboise thus
saw a succession of special tutors who came to imbue Francis I. with
aesthetic principles, and they retained the pleasantest recollections of
their stay. The young princess indeed spoilt them, pampered them, almost;
she had them at her own table, instead of leaving them to the society of
chamberlains and playactors: she made them talk, and talked with them.
In spite of all opposition, the education of men thus underwent a
gradual transformation in cultivated countries. Instead of maintaining
their former attitude of grave reserve, hardly distinguishable from
bashfulness, and of regarding everybody, especially persons well on in
years, with a distant respect; instead, notably, of showing in their
intercourse with women all the shades of respect from profound reverence
to profound courtesy, the majority of these young men made their entrance
into life without embarrassment and with the most charming manners. They
put off the armour of social etiquette, they were docile, pleasant,
graceful in bearing, proficient in the art of pleasing. A multitude of
books on “civility,” an excellent specimen of which came from the pen
of Erasmus, instructed them in the science of good-breeding, formerly
somewhat neglected. Moreover, as education is always the great objective
of men who desire to exercise a serious influence on thought, they vied
with one another in propounding theories and advocating each his own
system in regard to the direction of youth, a task which engrossed such
men as Cordier,[70] Sadoleto,[71] Vivès,[72] Luther, Calvin, Erasmus,
to mention only the chief. We need not follow here their far-reaching
discussions, which are but the development of the struggle entered
upon between the idealistic and the matter-of-fact spirits. On the
extreme frontier of the two realms Zwingle, established so to speak as
a mainguard, defends the German tactics. Without denying the amenities
of aestheticism, he declares for an education of cloistral severity,
for curricula of the exact sciences and logic, and prefers Hebraists or
erudite Hellenists to elegant Latinists.
Erasmus, on the contrary, marks out the Roman frontier. He considers
that any effort to direct the intelligence of children into one rigid
channel only has the effect of drying it up. He appreciates neither the
exhibition of truth in its skeleton state, the system which flourished
in the schools of the Middle Ages, nor the pure apprenticeship to
utilitarianism to which Zwingle inclines. The sentiment of the beautiful,
in his view, offers an immense advantage in life—that of sustaining
and consoling the spirit; in education there is no other process for
widening, refining, elevating the faculties.[73] The new movement has his
entire approval.
Indeed, he is ready to go very far. Instead of banishing all thoughts
of women from their minds, he is surprisingly ready to explain to
young men that there are two loves, a good and a bad, and to set them
such subjects for composition as the question “ought a man to marry or
not?” Hütten[74] pokes great fun at the coy professors who so carefully
expurgate the mythology, who would fain drape the Muses and turn them
into angels, or who compare Diana to the Virgin Mother.
In reality, as everybody had his own programme of education, dependent
on no one’s theories or whims, all this fine ardour produced little but
modifications of detail. So men remained faithful to gymnastics and
all the sports—riding, hunting, fishing, tennis, perhaps even to sober
philosophic deambulations in the style of St. Gregory of Nazianzen. But
they held dancing in less abhorrence, and the love of gaming worked havoc.
Music triumphed over its detractors, who had been wont to represent it as
directly tending towards effeminacy and voluptuous impressibility. Now,
on the contrary, it was regarded as a child’s most ennobling avocation
and a precious resource for forming his mind. Instruction in the
principles of design seemed a necessity for men who were called to live
among objects of art, and who, without some practical experience, would
infallibly fall a prey to pinchbeck.
However, it is impossible to deny that a too exclusive development of
the emotional side of their nature did produce, among certain young
men, untoward and even disastrous results. Education had become very
wide-spread; everybody sought after it, rather out of _amour-propre_
than to supply needs they really felt; and the result was that there
was less anxiety to equip solidly a few choice minds than to give the
mass a superficial polish. The world was overrun with amiable young
men, patterns of social accomplishment, knowing how to bow, dancing
well, of excellent table manners, primed moreover with a few tags of
Latin or Greek, living in elegant idleness, and thus the pride of the
good merchant who had the honour of begetting them and keeping the pot
boiling. Their weak point was that they knew too much of life in their
beardless youth: aestheticism had brought them neither illusions nor
enthusiasm; but they were past-masters in the commercial valuation of
some fashionable young lady and her belongings.
At the age of fifteen or sixteen, all these young fellows, good or bad,
took flight in the most diverse directions, and escaped from their mother
for good and all.
She sees them go! Some, the smartest of them, go to Court as brilliant
pages, all ablaze with gold and velvet: the others into some château,
where they combine the duties of head-huntsman and stud-groom, and dine
in the kitchen, hoping to be mentioned in their master’s will.
Others, maintained by a more subtle father, are commissioned “to attain
unto the virtue and honour that knowledge gains for gentlemen.”[75]
Ah! the gay young sparks! They proceed, at great expense, to establish
themselves at Padua, Bologna, or elsewhere, and there the lore they
gather comes from profound study of Signora Angela’s ankles or Signora
Camilla’s bright eyes. One of these pious youths, the son of a councillor
of Paris, dismissed post-haste the private tutor accompanying him. So
long as the lad’s purse holds out, the father proves indulgent, and
indeed is secretly not a little proud of his heir’s escapades. Boys will
be boys. One facetious father addresses a letter to his son “studying at
Padua—or sent to study.”
Many people attributed the wildness of young men to the fact that their
education was not directed by women.
Calvin considers that the young men were thrown too much into women’s
society; Henri Estienne[76] charges upon aesthetic education all the
vices of the age. This is going a little too far: it would be just as
reasonable to make the vices of the age responsible for the bad results
of education. As a matter of fact, notwithstanding a certain measure
of progress, the education of the sixteenth century did commit errors
for which it had to pay. Discipline was relaxed.[77] It was a common
complaint that studies lost tone as they became more general;[78] the
new education took its pupils too young, forced them remorselessly
through too extensive curricula, encouraged them to be content with a
smattering, gave them the habit of not going deep into anything, and made
shallow and paradoxical men.
Two women who were the products of the most opposite principles, Louise
of Savoy and Anne of France, were on their guard against this error. The
one determined to have her son educated under her own eyes, the other
undertook the education of her future son-in-law—a clear proof that all
women cannot be charged with particular faults.
However paradoxical the idea may appear, it seems that the system of
education ought to have been more completely revolutionised. Either
the old principle of bringing boys up so as to make men of them should
have been maintained, or a new one should have been boldly and frankly
enunciated, namely, that it would be well for a boy to be brought up by
his mother, since he is to live with a woman, and a girl by her father,
since she is to live with a man. Of this principle, however, we nowhere
find the slightest hint.
In this education there would have been something more intimate, more
just, more natural, and perhaps more profitable. You can tell among a
thousand the men who have been brought up by a serious mother, and the
women brought up by a careful father.
Unhappily, the social customs of the time raised an insurmountable
obstacle. In addition to the fears of excessive sensibility of which we
have spoken, the rigid family principle ordained that the son should
belong to the family and not to his mother. He was a man: therefore
let him ride and hunt and be a soldier! It was better to err through
brutality than through tenderness.
In reality, many mothers exercised but an indirect and ineffective
influence on their sons. The sons were too much separated from them
and left them too soon. Were the mothers made for the children or the
children for the mothers? Judging from the number of households which
were only held together by the children, one might think they were made
for the mothers; and yet a woman who relied too much on this support was
sure to remain in cruel loneliness.
CHAPTER IV
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS
If the sons were destined almost inevitably to disappoint their mothers’
hopes, the daughters were to compensate for that disappointment. We must
crave pardon for entering into all these details. It is impossible to
set forth the story of a woman’s heart without first of all plumbing as
deeply as possible the secret of those holy passions which move women as
mothers and as daughters. We started from the solid ground of marriage
after the old style, a mere physical and rational fact. The sensibility
of women begins to blossom out on coming into contact with physical
wretchedness; it creates the sick-nurse and the alms-distributor; it
is then that the mother is born. Her love for her sons has nothing but
separation to look forward to; but in the love of mother for daughter a
woman’s heart finds another stay. Here there is no interference to be
feared from a third party. The daughter belongs to the mother, and the
father does not even seek any share in their intimacy: “Women’s policy
hath a mystical proceeding; we must be content to leave it to them.”[79]
Let the father provide the girl’s dowry, that is all that is required of
him. In the formal and somewhat Philistine society which was the outcome
of the Middle Ages, the several shares of the parents were very clearly
defined.
But these things which the father knew nothing about are of the greatest
interest for us. We want to know what went on between mother and
daughter, and how the women of the future were being formed, for then
we shall know also whether the mother was able to fashion for herself
a lasting joy in her home, and whether she was so well satisfied with
the principles on which she herself had been brought up as to apply
them to her daughter. Later on we shall have to treat of more momentous
questions, of ideas much more highly artistic and philosophic, but we
shall meet with none from which a more thorough knowledge of the inner
workings of feminine souls is to be gained. In the slightest question of
education all the social questions have their echoes, as we hear the roar
of the ocean in a shell.
Historians are very far from agreement in the information they give us
as to the manner in which young girls were educated in those days. An
old, but false, proverb runs: “The mother feeds, the father instructs”;
which signifies in plain language that the mother never instructed,
suckling being the top of her capacity. On the other hand, as the
treatises on education speak only of the boys, or at most of “children,”
and practically never use the word “daughters,” some historians have
concluded that the girls were left to vegetate and that their education
was never considered, while others, on the contrary, and these not the
least important—such as Burckhardt and Minghetti—have believed that the
girls merely followed the same course as the boys.
We shall not traverse these two opinions, contradictory as they are,
because they both appear true to a certain extent.
The question of education really depends on another question, of much
greater moment, which we have set ourselves to answer in this book: What
ought women’s life to be? Where ought they to seek their happiness?
And at the outset we are brought face to face with a very troublesome
problem. Is a woman to continue to be married passively, as we have
seen her married—to be left almost a slave? or is she to be put into a
condition of self-defence? Is she to be made an obedient tool, a mirror
of the ideas of others, destitute of all mind of her own, and all the
happier in knowing nothing beyond the narrow bounds of her bedroom? or
does it seem better to render her an active, educated creature, with an
individuality of her own, capable of reasoning and acting? Is the mother
to remain merely a temporary guardian, charged with watching over a
little girl for a master of undisputed title, who will form her and train
her after his own fancy, and to whom she will belong at the earliest
moment, even in her first flower? or is the mother to be at perfect
liberty to link herself closely with her daughter, and, precisely because
the girl is one day to be given to another, to arm her with independence
and intelligence, even although she knows that sooner or later some
portion of this armour must be dropped on the way? There is the whole
question. And on that question depends the education of girls.
In the first case (that is if we adopt the time-honoured theory)
the mother was preparing a blank page. She had little to do except
to promote as hardy a vegetation as possible, a blossoming out into
strength and beauty, to maintain absolutely unbroken quietude, to
respect and even prolong the days of childhood.[80] There is no need
here for lengthy dissertations: the system consisted in proscribing
everything that involved the slightest mental exertion, even in the form
of little pastimes; in preserving an absolute simplicity, a cloistral
existence;[81] in shunning even physical exercises if they were at all
energetic. From the intellectual standpoint it allowed, on the artistic
side, some trifling pieces of needlework (tapestry, netting, or the
like); music, not suggestive or light, but classical music; as recreative
reading, some elementary books of religion or morality; in science, some
notions of physics, agriculture, medicine, some philosophical expositions
of great moral questions, such as original sin, the Redemption, the
immortality of the soul, and the Creed in general. That was what had gone
to form the little bride, the robust, sedate, matter-of-fact, shy little
creature whom at the beginning of this book we saw led to the altar. She
was ignorant, but so much the better: she was only being born into life,
but she brought as her stake a solid health and a well-balanced character
generally; and at thirteen years, that was a good deal. The husband would
do the rest.
And it must not be imagined that this system, barbarous as it may seem to
some, was regarded as at all ill-conceived. It had numerous friends. The
learned of the Middle Ages, from the venerable Egidio Colonna[82] to the
illustrious Gerson,[83] had formed no other idea of women’s needs. Gerson
even enunciated the aphorism (which, however, must not be pressed):
“All instruction for women should be looked at askance.” In this the
philosophers were at one with the physicians, whose advice was to err on
the side of caution. In support of their position, they invoked the great
name of St. Chrysostom,[84] and that of Lycurgus also, who wished to
prolong the childhood of young girls to the eighteenth year (and this in
Greece), and to devote the whole period to the care of the body.
On this system, the mothers could not form close ties with their
daughters, still less enter into their life. One mother, however,
inspired by her ardent devotion to an only daughter, and at the same
time thoroughly conversant with the actual necessities of life—Anne
of France—has shown to what good account these apparently rudimentary
opportunities might be turned, while paying due respect to the advice of
Gerson and the physicians. She set down her views in a little work, of
a purely practical and intimate character, designed for her daughter’s
use, and written day by day with a certain desultoriness, according to
the line her reflections or her reading happened to take, and without the
slightest intention of supporting a thesis. This book imparts to us _ex
abrupto_ the secret of her thoughts.
She pinned her faith to education, not to instruction; she desired an
education that was spontaneous and in some sort automatic, which would
result, not from a perfect intimacy between mother and daughter, still
less from a sentiment of equality, but solely from a kindly, frank, and
affectionate association, of such a nature that the mother would colour
her child’s character “as good wine colours its cask.”
This gentle prescription assumes a wide mental culture to begin with, and
a certain robustness of intelligence. Anne of France intended the moral
and philosophic education of the girl to be carried out with the aid of
Boethius, Plato, the fathers of the church, the ancient philosophers,
and, it need hardly be said, in conformity with the “Instructions of St.
Louis.”
On the other hand she did not trouble to develop the imagination or the
emotions: she had a horror of affectation, of all that appeared to her
to smack of the studied, the conventional, the theatrical: she would
not permit it anywhere, either in dress, in which she rejected false
simplicity and false elegance alike, or in conversation, studies, or
conduct. She loved only the splendour of truth, the glorification of the
real in its noble aspects. It was her aim to temper the young girl’s soul
by instilling into her the habit of searching enquiry and deep thought,
and of building her reasoning always on clear premises like the certainty
of death or the existence of God.
From these principles there resulted, not a critical scepticism like that
of Montaigne, Pascal, or Descartes, but, if one may say so, a vigorous
and affirmative scepticism, that is to say, the absolute, perhaps even
harsh determination to look the facts of life fairly in the face, as
serious but ephemeral matters; and to abstain from giving them colours,
shapes, an import which do not belong to them, from throwing a false halo
about them. As a drowning man clings to a rope, so Anne of France clung
to a precise and objective morality, which, firmly anchored on religious
faith, defied discouragements and fatigues as well as illusions. Beyond
the restless sea of mundane realities in all their nakedness, it pointed
to other realities, which appeared to her just as clear, just as
positive, and in which she found a steadfast beacon light.
In thus basing feminine education on individualism and a severe
conception of the True, Anne feared rather than desired the intrusion
of aestheticism. What was required, in her opinion, was to form strong
women, vigorous in body and mind: she wished to develop strength of
will and stability of character, which are practical virtues. Assuredly
she had no personal scorn for the beautiful: she gave proof enough to
the contrary. She loved an art full of sap and zest; she was a subtle
connoisseur, a royal patron! Delight in beautiful things was so natural
to her that she counted on transmitting the taste to her daughter.
And she was accomplished in philosophy; she read Plato, a first step
which some of the most confirmed lady platonists neglected. But she was
persuaded that the period of struggle was only opening for women, and
that they must arm themselves to maintain the fight. She had no bent
towards German utilitarianism—she could not have contented herself with
the studies Luther sanctioned, nor with the elementary programme of
virtue which Calvin found all-sufficient: at the same time, she had no
greater confidence in the idealism of Rome. The world was not yet perfect
enough! She joyfully hailed the dawn, but did not believe that the day
was yet fully come. Women must not be content with a dilettante reliance
on impressions; they must make what they love an object of thought, and
having formed their reasoned conception, must seek to realise it. For
them to be queens would be admirable indeed; but for the present it is
enough for them to escape crushing. What they need is will, and, as a
consequence, intellect and individuality.
This was a clear enough scheme of life. In Spain the same ideas obtained
so striking a success that people were not satisfied with the compromise
devised by Anne of France, and with this wholly moral education
which would leave the daughter for a few short years to her mother.
Circumstances were urgent; there was no time to waste; ideas were at
boiling-point: a part of the ancient principles, the physical and moral
repose recommended by the physicians, was sacrificed, and the children
were flung headlong into the whirlpool. Little girls sucked in Latin with
their mother’s milk; then, the soul being expropriated, so to speak, for
the public good, they were given a tutor at an age when they ought to
have been learning nothing but how to walk; at seven they were expected
to be able to maintain a conversation, and at thirteen to have finished
their studies and be ripe for matrimony.
This programme, so vigorous that at first blush one would be tempted to
think it a mere figment of the imagination, was not only propounded but
largely practised by one of the most conspicuous men of the time—Vivès,
the tutor of Isabella the Catholic’s daughters. Vivès went to England in
the train of Catherine of Aragon, and in that country of matter-of-fact
aspirations he could still have believed himself in Spain, so successful
was he in rousing the same fire and enthusiasm for his ideas. His fervour
led to a revolution, or rather, as Erasmus said with a smile, to a
“topsy-turvydom” in high society; the men, who continued to scour the
seas and do business in great waters, fell quite to the rear, while the
young ladies, stepping to the front, engaged with a brisk rivalry in
marvellous exhibitions of precocity. At thirteen, Lady Jane Grey read
Plato in the original, and Mary Stuart delivered in public her first
Latin speech; at fourteen, Queen Elizabeth translated a work by Margaret
of France, _The Mirror of the Sinful Soul_. These wonderfully clever
children were not confined to any particular country, and the same breeze
fanned the same flame from John o’ Groats to Gibraltar. Saint Theresa,
who was born in 1515, is an excellent type of her contemporaries. Bereft
of her mother, and one of a family of twelve, she was certainly not the
object of any special training, but kept pace with girls of her age; yet
at six years she was already, to use her own expression, “swept away by
a violent movement of love,” and had to be prevented from hurrying to
Africa in the hope of being massacred and winning heaven cheaply. What
singular girls!
The thing that urged them on was the general fear in which the husband
was held, the pressing need of attaining, ere it was too late, a good
condition of defence and even of superiority. The rising spectre of
marriage fascinated teacher and taught alike. At ten years of age, to
tell the truth, such personages as Anne of France and Margaret of France
had already disposed of their heart! so that to overwhelm them with
work was believed the best way to protect them against themselves. “The
craters of Etna, the forge of Vulcan, Vesuvius, Olympus cannot compare
their fires to those of the temperament of a young girl inflamed by high
feeding,” cries Vivès. The more effectually to extinguish these flames
Vivès reinforces the regimen of work with a course of cold water and a
vegetable diet, and this he austerely names “the perpetual fast” of the
Christian life; he proscribes dancing, and counts on serious studies to
preserve them from vanity and to widen the scope of their intellectual
activities. In short, while more sharply accentuating the scientific
note than Anne of France, he has the same end in view. Like her, he is
convinced, passionately convinced indeed, that it is right to set a
straight course for marriage, having now only a half-hearted belief in
the old ideal of virginity: he has, further, so rooted a horror of vain
sentimentalities, affectations, romances, poetry, all sensibility real
or affected, that he throws overboard Italian and French for his pupils:
he wishes them to have wills and energies of their own. But like a true
Spaniard, an enthusiast and yet a Stoic, he loves these warm, ardent
natures. He is a little like that lord-justice who in his official tone
interrupted a too pertinacious advocate, but under his breath bade him
continue. He shrinks from the flames, but sees in them the instrument of
regeneration. These little girls of thirteen, inured to the reading of
Scripture, tricked out with history and ethics, with Xenophon and Seneca,
he sends forth to the conquest of the world, to fulfil their vocation
as women. He hopes that their initiation into Biblical exegesis will
lead them to construct a philosophical religion for themselves, and that
they will attain a rational appreciation of Catholicism as the source of
justice and knowledge, and the sole panacea for society. That is the gist
of his preaching to the daughters of Isabella the Catholic. Did Luther
himself probe nearer the heart of the matter, or outline a scheme more
novel and more magnificent?
Let us complete our portrait of Vivès, and at the same time that of many
a young woman of the new generation, by adding that he by no means looked
down on the practical knowledge of plain cooking, of domestic economy
or the common medicines. It might be thought that he had no ardour but
for the Bible, and there is no lack of ill-natured jesters who cast a
stone at his Latinist ladies;[85] whereas, on the contrary, he spoke
up for the kitchen, though to the detriment of dress and dolls. “What,”
he cries, “is not a hand smutted with coal as good as a snow-white hand
that is open to everyone?” It only needs a father or mother to fall ill,
and he is perfectly happy, for then you will see his fair Latinist in
neat white apron, bringing a cooling draught she herself has mixed, and
bestowing one of those smiles for which one would gratefully gulp down a
whole druggist’s shop. Here, according to him, is the distinguishing mark
of his system; a practically useful intelligence, and a physical as well
as moral devotion.
The Italian school drew its inspiration much more directly from the
need of the ideal; it rejected passion as full of peril and made
mere sensibility its goal. But it too pretended to take its stand on
conceptions of absolute truth, though more elementary ones; and these
it did not represent as intellectual acquirements, because it regarded,
not knowledge, but feeling and judgment, as the end a woman ought to
set before her. The education dear to this school was above all an
education of impressions and enthusiasm, in which scientific truth only
came in to supply ballast and to prevent an exaggerated serenity, or
an over-confidence in life. In its refinement and elegance this school
preserved as it were an after perfume from the noble city of Rome, where
fastidious and ceremonious prelates, gourmets but not cooks, let money
flow into their pockets through immense spiritual aqueducts, and set
about pouring it away again in perfect cascades of ostentation. Hands
smutty with coal indeed! A lazzarone would blush at the thought! There
are none but princesses in Italy.
Dolce, a supreme example of the Italian, took, for the formation of an
Italian woman, the recognised elements: chastity, modesty, reserve,
composure, and a regular study (this was to be particularly free, with
no expurgation) of the classics and the church fathers;[86] and from all
this he would fashion for you the sweetest creature imaginable.
Idleness and melancholy were his two great foes: he had no hostility
to love. What reason was there to abstain from carefully cultivating a
young girl’s capacity for loving, seeing that as a woman she would find
in it her chief resource? To reject the thought of love, to avoid the
very utterance of the word, and then, like Vivès, to rack your brains
to create infinite derivatives, was, according to Dolce, a childish and
an untrustworthy proceeding; it would be much better to face the ordeal
frankly, and deaden its shocks beforehand by anointing oneself with the
healing balm of platonic doctrine, by exhibiting, on the one hand, the
body in its wretchedness, the vileness of earthly love, and on the other
the beauty of love divine and pure. Women may fall through passion,
but they can win salvation through sensibility, and therefore Dolce
nourished them on the appropriate classics: Virgil, parts of Horace,
Dante, Petrarch, Bembo, Sannazaro,[87] and, more especially, Castiglione.
To his opponents, however, this system seemed over-venturesome; they
reproached him with going half-way to meet danger, with putting into
hands still weak the two-edged sword which so often wounds lustier hands.
To this objection Dolce returned on behalf of the beautiful the same
answer that Vivès made on behalf of the true. He was convinced that a
liberal education was most surely calculated to form strong souls, citing
in support of his contention Corinna and a thousand other old-world
heroines rendered impeccable by culture, and, of his own time, the four
daughters of queen Isabel, pupils of Vivès; all four, indeed, equally
accomplished and yet equally unfortunate—but could anyone begrudge them
their misfortunes?
Thus, according to Dolce, abstract or severe studies were not for girls:
“vain and futile quackeries” he called them, which could only bring
them in subjection to men. “All that is needed is to awaken and foster
the faculties which are in women.” To rule as with a rod of iron, women
need only remain as they are, with the talents given them by nature.[88]
What is the good of teaching them, for example, the dates and the nice
problems of history? They should be taught to read history, to derive
from the accurate narrative of facts an impression of the poignant
emotions and moral struggles which the historian necessarily indicates
with a more or less light touch, and then, linking these events together
in their minds, to get at the heart of them, deduce the lofty moral
principles controlling them. In philosophy they have no need of great
metaphysical principles; but what is important for them is to understand
that misery exists, that there is suffering everywhere, often hidden away
and yet only too real. Woman is a fellow-worker with God! It suffices to
lop off the thorns which cumber her; she will shoot up naturally towards
the light, sucking, like a flower, the earth’s sap, which is love. The
corn which is to go to the mill and make bread needs the plough’s rude
toil, a lovely delicate flower often asks no more than a handful of earth
and a bountiful sky.
And it was in this way that so many sweet Italian women blossomed
out, almost spontaneously, delighting in life, themselves the joy and
felicity of the world, all compact of poetry, archaeology, rhetoric, and
philosophy—Attic through and through at thirteen years. The efflorescence
was universal save at Venice, a country half-Germanic, half-Oriental,
where they insisted on keeping the girls immured until their wedding-day,
showing nothing of them but bundles of millinery on Sundays. And yet
there do not appear to have been more angels at Venice than elsewhere,
and no one succeeded there in resuscitating the type (henceforth unknown)
of matrons hypnotised, as it were, by their husbands’ frown or the idea
of death. Italy was peopled with fairy-like creatures, who thought nobly
of all men and wore to admiration the double ornament of fine jewels and
a fine intellect. “A little girl,” said Bembo, “ought to learn Latin: it
puts the finishing touch to her charms.”
Louise of Savoy brought up her daughter Margaret according to these
Italian principles at a period when France as yet did not understand
them. Margaret blossomed like a flower: she knew something of everything
(too much indeed), notably of philosophy and theology: she learnt Latin,
Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish; but she could speak nothing but French.
At nine years of age, she was wonderfully clever and accomplished; at
thirteen, she inspired so much admiration as to be considered “rather
Persian than French.”
The defects of the system were not at once perceived, though these were
developing in women a thirst like that of Tantalus, exciting a state of
restless agitation and nervousness, which the old doctors of Gerson’s
school professed to guard against and which Vivès fancied he had avoided
by directing their activity towards a definite end. People were struck
only with the immediate advantages. Erasmus uttered heart-rending plaints
about the little girls he was ever meeting in the Low Countries, poor
ignorant little creatures, thick-lipped, podgy, stuck on high heels so as
to appear grown-up, over-dressed, rigged out with a load of ribbons and
feathers, with all the airs of innocent little baggages: “I ask myself,”
he cries, “if these are dolls, or monkeys, or girls.” How he would have
liked to tear off all that flummery, and fill their beaks with a little
Greek or French, or even a little Latin!
A simple fellow said to Margaret: “Men and women have different
functions, but their virtues ought to be equal.” He was making a mistake;
the virtues of women ought to be superior.
But if women believe that it is their mission to rule instead of to obey,
or, at any rate, that the obedience they owe has well-defined limits;
if they are no longer the burden which a father used to get rid of as
soon as possible, and which a husband received as his absolute property,
body and soul; if they desire to count for something; if marriage is
regarded as the union of two persons equally free, as the close and not
the commencement of education; if the wife is no longer the pupil of
her husband, and it is considered better for her to come to him fully
instructed: then a very natural consequence will inevitably ensue,
whatever may be thought or said: women will marry later, will insist on
exercising a choice as men do, and on laying down their own conditions:
they will in this way imagine that they have greater freedom and are
probably making a better bargain, for they have become women of sense.
The fortunate discovery was made that Lycurgus, in the main, considered
twenty years the best age for marriage: with the result that in the most
aristocratic families, and those most swayed by tradition, they waited
with the most perfect resignation until the seventeenth year,[89] while
ladies of exceptional courage held that it was “modern style” to marry
much later. Margaret of France was not married till she was thirty-seven.
This reform, important as it was, did not end in making what we should
regard as a happy girlhood possible.
However the Italian theory might wreathe life with roses and preserve a
happy ignorance of physiological problems, it was not easy for a French
girl to reach that point and retain this beautiful innocence, surrounded
as she was by people who called a spade a spade, idealising things no
more than in the days when she was married as soon as born.
Girlhood was not a delightful fiction which permits infinite hopes to be
cherished, and keeps realities hidden; it was rather an apprenticeship;
and after all, since the wife has a personal mission to accomplish in
the world, which will consist, so to speak, in patching and renovating
hearts that are rent, this apprenticeship seems as necessary to her as to
a laundress or a dressmaker.
The art cannot be learnt more successfully than in maidenhood.
From the moment this was admitted, it is correct to say, girls received
the same education as men: with this qualification, that their education
was more thorough, because they made a later beginning in life.
In the first place, they had male teachers, or even a tutor. Margaret of
France, like her brother, was taught only by tutors—a singular anomaly
at a time when women plumed themselves on their superiority, and one
which we shall not seek to explain. Humanists with the highest admiration
for woman’s intellect held governesses in horror,[90] and allowed no
discussion about the monopoly of instruction; even in Spain, the country
of learned women, Vivès insisted on instruction by men.
And yet the market was not overstocked with women’s tutors; the part
usually fell to more or less second-rate persons, who accepted it
light-heartedly enough; even in princely houses there was considerable
difficulty in keeping a man of real earnestness.
These young fellows readily transformed themselves into friends and
comrades: Brantôme accuses them of a thousand irregularities, and goes
so far as to match them with the physicians and apothecaries. Some of
them were known, it appears, to elope with their pupils, but that we must
believe to have been purely casual, and their gaiety to have taken, as
a rule, a more delicate form. Eustorg de Beaulieu[91] smilingly reminds
one of his pupils, now a staid wife and mother at Tulle, of the time when
she raved about her lessons, and said she would rather go to the clavecin
than to confession. Another pupil of his, the young Helen Gondy of Lyons,
called him in fun “her Hector,” a title which he accepted on the distinct
understanding that he was not stupidly to die for her, “like the other
Hector.” A third, Mademoiselle de Tournon, conceived the idea of making
a bishop of this excellent, jovial, amiable professor; but this time
Eustorg raised objections, and declared flatly that he was sure his skull
was too thick.
And so Dolce’s advice was followed; melancholy was banished. But I
am not sure that very fine distinctions were drawn between the two
kinds of love, or that the young masters possessed the delightful art
of developing only the fancy and the softer qualities. In France and
elsewhere, to all appearance, they rather treated their fair pupils in
masculine fashion, with a fearless handling of ideas; that at least is
the impression we get from Erasmus’ dialogues, _The Girl and the Lover_,
_The Youth and the Courtesan_. Brantôme taunts them with a certain
tendency to make special use of the risky passages in the Bible and their
authors for teaching theology and an elegant style.
In this way the young girls attained a perfect independence of mind. They
cannot even be compared with the American girl of to-day, for the old
hardy, somewhat wild French stock had undergone a wonderful grafting with
Italian refinement. Many of them, having reached a certain age, pursued
their studies with marvellous gusto; Petrarch and Erasmus they thought
rather poor stuff, preferring to work at Poggio[92] and Boccaccio. Their
style of talk was intrepid! Ah! there was no standing on ceremony with
them! Fun was fast and furious.
They devoured romances, novels and plays: these fine intrigues, these
riotous passions seemed to them to constitute the ideal life. They were
_demi-vierges_. “With all these lascivious romances, spotless virginity
will be unknown.”
To describe the indignation and grief of old-fashioned people at this
sight is impossible. “I would rather see a girl deaf or blind,” cries
Vivès, “than thus overstimulated to pleasure.” Of course it was pleaded
that the artistic instincts were being satisfied! But all these romances
bore but little likeness to the subtle analyses of our days, which are
sometimes masterpieces of philosophy: they were a tissue of adventures
all equally untrue to life. Vivès did not understand how, if only from
the point of view of taste, girls of any intelligence could go into
raptures over such extravagances: a knight who is left for dead, but
comes to life on the next page; a hero who massacres a hundred foes
single-handed; nor how they could worship as a demi-god the author of
such trash. He begs the mothers for pity’s sake to interfere, to take the
trouble to glance through a book before leaving it to their girls; but
the mothers are accustomed to live their own life, and besides, a lady
of fashion has so many occupations! He beseeches the preachers for help,
waxing almost indignant when he hears them pompously stringing together
their platitudes on dogma instead of boldly attacking questions of living
interest and condemning books that are absurd or of evil tendency. But
the preachers go on preaching.
Anne of France took a more dispassionate view: she saw clearly enough
that girls ought sometimes to put aside the church fathers, if only for
the pleasure of going back to them, and she did not despair of finding a
practical solution of the difficulty. Her dream was a very simple one—the
dream that recurs again and again and yet remains but a dream: namely,
to have good romances for young girls, pure, high-toned stories, replete
with the practical philosophy of life, and at the same time interesting,
dramatic, thrilling. She has left us a specimen, somewhat archaic
indeed, of what she desired: a historical romance founded on a passage
in Froissart about an unfortunate captain of Brest, one M. du Chatel,
whose son is, with flagrant bad faith, threatened with death by the
English if he does not betray the town into their hands. This eminently
patriotic subject is the groundwork of a little story, short, simple,
illustrated with a fair number of pictures, and in every way innocuous.
In the opening scene, Madame du Chatel swoons; further on, however,
it is she who, like a true woman, has all the strength of character,
and cheers her trembling husband with words worthy of a Roman matron,
or with magnificent appeals to the divine mercy, “although,” as she
says, “children are in a special sense the sons and daughters of their
mothers.” (How touching is this claim, interpolated quite incidentally!)
So the story proceeds with alternations of strength and weakness. On
coming to after a long swoon, the poor mother learns that her son is
dead. “God’s will be done!” she says, without a tear; “may our Lord
receive his soul!” And then she goes and dons her mourning, and, as soon
as she is alone, weeps!
And here, so please you, you have a story for young girls!
Unluckily, for a girl of eighteen or twenty life is no longer “such stuff
as dreams are made on,” and as a rule the romances, good or bad, are at
last thrown into the shade by a certain practical romance in which she
must needs play her part, and which demands her whole attention.
Not, assuredly, that all this led the young ladies to gild the pill or
modify their first conception of marriage; on the contrary, the more they
considered the matter, the more they weighed, in as just a balance as
men, the advantages against the disadvantages. Very often, princesses of
the blood royal loved simple noblemen, or even men of lower rank: they
never married them. It was too well known that love and marriage were two
different terms, and that certain old books, preserved in the libraries,
maintained the theory that married women, “possessing what maids seem
to seek,” should remain at home and never again exhibit themselves for
the pleasure of others, or even for their own. Formerly a girl of ten
years, repressed and secluded, could picture marriage as a source of
“liberty and pleasure”; and these blessings once secured are sedulously
guarded. You must be grateful to men for giving you their name and
fortune, of course; but some men are so odd! It is impossible to take too
many precautions. Many an excellent young man, pleasant enough to all
appearance, may turn out an insufferable husband.
And so it was with mingled prudence and dilettantism that these fair
sixteenth-century Americans set out in quest of the Golden Fleece. Little
hampered by parents who thought their whole duty was done when they
paid over the dowry, they learnt how pleasant it was to take life into
their own hands, to show themselves in society, to talk, laugh, dance,
frolic—live, in a word, without a by-your-leave to anyone. And yet the
Latin delicacy and grace betray themselves in various prejudices: to
practise archery, to pad themselves for a pass with the foils, or merely
to have their photographs taken as naiads—these resources were not yet
open to them! The poor things could only triumph by their charm and
enthusiasm, quite in the Latin way, at the risk of rubbing off a little
of their bloom here and there.
Outcries came from the dowagers: What! throw themselves at men’s heads
in that way! how scandalous! and how silly! Do they think then that men
are so stupid as not to consider serious qualities? For their amusement
indeed they like the coming-on disposition, but not for marriage: it
is Cinderella that attracts Prince Charming. Anne of France cites an
illustration in point: three young Germans of the highest distinction
arrived one day from the heart of their distant wilds with the sole
object of wedding the three maids of Poitiers, of whom marvellous tales
were told. It was a terrible shock when they found themselves each face
to face with his own fair damsel. The first had so squeezed her waist
that she well-nigh fell inanimate into the arms of her wooer, who was
thoroughly put out; the second chattered like a very magpie; the third
rather naïvely displayed a sentimentality in the latest mode; and the
upshot was that, with never a word to one another, the three Germans were
soon stride for stride footing it back to Germany. And Anne’s conclusion
is very reasonable: “Would it not have been better to cultivate a staider
manner?”
But it remained to be proved whether a staider manner would be right
after all, and whether a princess, of however high descent, could indulge
in the luxury of waiting at the chimney-corner until the man of her
dreams was pleased to appear. Unhappily the contrary was the general
belief. Someone has remarked that if men do not often marry the girl who
pleases them, they do not always marry the girl who displeases them. And
that is just the reason flirtation held its own.
The art of flirting is a very subtle one, and yet it is incredible how
little time was required to bring it to perfection. Everybody had to do
with it: even princesses wanted to fancy that they chose their husbands.
The young girl “came out” into the world in two ways. If she had no
mother, or her parents found it convenient to separate themselves from
her, there was in France a patriarchal custom, peculiar to that country,
which consisted in the girl’s entering the service of a “dame” or
“demoiselle” of good repute. So highly was this custom esteemed, that
Anne of France recommended her daughter to conform to it should occasion
arise, although the heiress of the duchy of Bourbon had certainly no need
of entering anyone’s service to push her way in the world.
Anne herself, and Anne of Brittany, thus kept “schools of manners”—a sort
of fashionable boarding-school, where the young men never addressed the
girls but on bended knee in the ancient style, and where the somewhat
cloistral austerity seemed mitigated by the belief that so excellent
a place and so well guaranteed a virtue could not fail to tempt the
most fastidious husbands. But this institution, intended to serve as a
bulwark against the new manners, floated along, on the contrary, in their
current: Catherine de’ Medici’s “flying squadron,” as it was called,
completely lost the character of a boarding-school, and discharged its
functions with freelance recklessness.
For the most part, it was at her mother’s side that a girl set off in
quest of a husband. The plan of operations varied so greatly that no
one will expect us to unravel its principles. All these young girls
matched one another in _chic_. They never spoke to their mothers without
bleating “Madame ma mère,” or lisping “By your favour, madam,” like so
many well-behaved silly sheep. Many of them were for ever showing their
teeth: they had a laugh for anything—a phrase, a fly, a gentleman with
a bald head. One laughing sent the others into fits too, and that was
thought remarkably witty. They were experts in the “sedate management
of their green-blue eyes, full of softness and opened neither too
little nor too much.” They wore lovely dresses—monumental robes which
yet seemed rather an accompaniment than a vesture for their limbs. Some
old folk (Vivès, for example) professed horror at their ring-loaded
fingers, their pierced ears (a barbarous custom, to be sure!), those
light, delicate touches of the brush with which they did up the face, and
those subtle perfumes wafted from no one knows where: in all this they
saw woful error, and even worse, rank folly. They sharply reprimanded
the mothers, reproaching them for a multitude of things: for withering
the natural goodness and charitableness of their daughters by fostering
expensive habits; for inciting them to a false luxury, all vulgarity
and tinsel, which is neither comely nor virtuous, and helps not a whit
towards matrimony—at least it is to be hoped so, for it would be a great
imprudence to depart so far from reality, and to entice a man into
marriage by means of the rouge-pot and sham charms.[93]
But materfamilias is a lady of fashion, accustomed to shine in society,
and seeing no harm in it; further, she is too good a mother not to desire
success for her offspring, not to applaud a venturesome flight. She,
too, has dreams of a Prince Charming; she has her enthusiasms, which
take clear and definite shape in her mind as positive hopes. As for the
father, he becomes cantankerous, and considers only the expense of the
game; he is quite of the dowagers’ opinion, and thinks well enough of
men to believe that they pay most attention to serious qualities. And
so, in order to compose once for all this perpetual domestic wrangle, a
great wag, Coquillart,[94] proposes to clothe the girls in parti-coloured
dresses, one colour for the father, another for the mother.
When a girl makes a successful start, certain mothers are seized with a
sort of fanaticism; we are wrong in calling it fanaticism: it is really
a new outburst of good-heartedness and the passion for self-sacrifice of
which women are possessed, for, if they reflected, they would clearly
realise that personally they have nothing to gain by a brilliant match
for their daughters.
Some of them push self-sacrifice to the point of servility; they efface
themselves, walk in the rear, with the meek and deprecating bearing of a
waiting-maid. That is a form of goodness which the women of former days
would not have understood—Anne of France choked at the mere mention of
it. She had commanded armies, bearded diplomatists, made men her puppets,
checkmated her judges, manipulated her States-general, set her whole
country in a ferment without a sign of feeling: but here she lost command
of herself: “It is tomfoolery ... it is overweening presumption in the
daughter, and in the mother sheer madness.”
Kisses, caresses, secret trysts, presents, love-letters, showers of
rondeaus and ballads, stolen glances, songs more than gay—all this made
French flirtation an exquisite pastime, essentially intoxicating in its
charm. The good, modest young damsel, who would cast down her eyes in the
street, was not a whit shocked at a pretty broad jest in the company of
men:
Aucunes sont, qui, en humbles manières,
Avec les folz jouent leurs jarretières.[95]
—_Bouchet._
In the evening by candle-light, ensconced in some nook of the spacious
fire-place, young men and girls would sit unceremoniously on one
another’s knees, laughing and talking nonsense. People who have got past
these maidenly frolics themselves find it more and more difficult to
become reconciled to them. Jean Bouchet feelingly describes them in his
book, _Les Regnars traversant les voies périlleuses_, at a period when
the art was still in its infancy. Young men easily get absolution: they
naturally profit by opportunities of amusing themselves; and, besides,
theirs is the passive part. But the girls! how venturesome they are, how
light-heartedly they chip, at least in spirit, the poor remnant of their
semi-virginity!
It would be a mistake to suppose that flirtation will in time lead to the
introduction of the love element into marriage. These damsels are by no
means anxious to allow the principle of earthly love—that is to say, a
germ of divorce—to steal into their married life. Their ideal consists in
falling in love with a man of wealth and established position, and so far
it has a reassuring character, worthy of respect. At this stage of their
life they are working for themselves, as later they will have to work for
humanity. M. Bourget has discovered in America the different varieties of
the sixteenth-century flirt: the professional beauty; the girl of ideas,
who stumps a platform and stands for the parish council; the “jolly good
fellow”; the girl of well-balanced philosophical mind; the coquette; the
girl of ambitions; all are ambitious and to some extent coquettish, and
even the philosophical girl gives the ideal only a secondary place.
But amid this charming round of coquetting and artless sensibility,
passion sometimes flashes out—passion, at once the great peril of the
Latin races and their eternal charm. One may be convinced that the heart
has been subdued by cold calculation, and that love is laid under a
spell by means of philosophy; but they burst their bonds! And here the
parts are not distributed as one would wish: this generation is about
to inflict a wound on platonism! Often it is the wife who, instead of
serving as an idol, gives herself to love. In the terrible veins of
French and Spanish women there flows a blood which they do not always
succeed in mastering, the old blood of knights or peasants; they bruise
themselves against the invisible mail-armour of modern life.
In the second act you would almost invariably see the serving-maid appear
on the scene—the “confidante” of the plays, a good soul, as indulgent to
everyone as she is to herself, devoted, and not more thick-headed than
becomes her, thoroughly convinced that she has something to gain from
every intrigue. The mother has her own affairs and her dignity to attend
to, which keeps her in ignorance of what is going on; whilst with the
maid there are private conversations, mutual unbosomings, a companionship
in study of the facts of life. Lucky, indeed, if some smart lackey, let
in on the strength of his ingenuous manner, does not put in his word!
Saint Theresa thus plunged with masterful strokes into the swirling tide
of existence, with the aid of a serving-maid, at the age of fifteen. Her
father placed her in a convent, but the walls were no barrier to her:
she performed unheard-of feats, broke through the roof, wrenched away
the gratings. She had to be despatched to a more reposeful situation—to
an uncle stuffed with the fathers of the church, a man after Vivès’
own heart; from his care she returned with a passion for religion, and
escaped once more, this time to enter a Carmelite convent in the teeth
of opposition. She was now in her nineteenth year, and her trials,
repentances, revolts were only just beginning; eighteen more years of
struggle were required ere this tempestuous character was at last soothed
definitively into mildness.
Unhappily, the girls’ little love affairs sometimes had graver
consequences. Plays and novels show us situations awkward enough: in one
of Parabosco’s comedies, the mother arrives a little behind the fair.
Laughing, boisterous, pitch-forked into life, the poor children do not
pretend to have the ferocious virtues that men have not.[96] Is that
their fault, since they have been brought up like men? If they go wrong,
it is not from a bent towards wrong; it is as the birdling errs, buffeted
by the storm on its first escape from the nest. To avoid risk altogether,
they would have to remain for ever under the mother’s wing, as the early
educators wished.
In the sixteenth century, there were still good people who wished girls
to become deaf-mutes again, and constitute Our Lady “the guardian and
warder of their hearts.” But such talk was not very effective.
Wise counsellors and practical preachers who advocated “retreats,” and
knew the world, addressed themselves directly to the girls and sought
to touch the chord of self-interest. The grave Jean Raulin,[97] from the
eminence of one of the most fashionable pulpits in Paris, reasoned with
them somewhat as follows: “To wed a widow, well and good! There is no
fuss, no golden ring, no benediction, but withal it is a marriage: whilst
with a counterfeit young maid presenting herself at the altar—! Ah! fair
ladies, guard your purity to the very hour of your espousals, whether you
be earthly or spiritual brides! That is the precious treasure you must at
all costs save, and for many reasons: because of human frailty, according
to the words of the 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians, ‘We have our treasure
in earthen vessels’; because of its inestimable value, according to the
words of Ecclesiasticus, chapter xxvi., ‘There is no price worthy of a
continent soul’; because of the irreparability of the mischief, according
to the words of St. Jerome, ‘God can do all things save restore a lost
virginity.’”
Many could not help regretting the free country life, and fancied that
fidelity to a more rigorous system of education would have yielded
better results. Of a truth it would have been better to make women frank
creatures of passion than coquettes or mere worldlings. But an honest
glance at the life of rural folk was enough to assure the observer that
utilitarianism does not elevate the manners. Yes, seen from a distance,
the ways of country folk seem compact of smiles and caresses, love
and candour: pigs and cows meet in the meadow or at the fair; lovers
too meet, at church, at a dance, after those winter parties so hotly
denounced by the preachers, nay, every morning and evening if their
hearts bid them; and they can exchange little presents, meet to scrape
the fiddle or twang the guitar, without anyone finding fault, save
perhaps a rival with whom they are quits for a few rounds at fisticuffs,
or at most a thrust with a knife. A fashionable young girl, you may be
sure, would not be horrified at the exchange of a few good swashing blows
for her; she is apt to regard life as too tame. It remains to discover
whether to reduce life to its primitive simplicity is really to elevate
it. The idealists thought not.
CHAPTER V
THE HUSBAND AND THE VARIOUS WAYS OF SLIPPING HIS YOKE
The most troublesome question to be settled in regard to feminism is that
of the authority of the husband. Legally, the husband was head of the
household, an idea which found ready acceptance among the lower ranks of
society, and which the people applied with its habitual logic. It won
warm approval from Rabelais. Nothing struck men as more grotesque than a
husband suspected of having allowed his wife to get the upper hand. An
artisan of Bourges, at whom some unpleasant neighbours hummed a refrain
about a woman who thrashed her husband, on that ground alone brought
against them an action for slander.
In all sincerity, the husband considered himself an absolute owner,
the lord and master, the head and soul of his wife, that “feminine and
feeble creature” whom he condescended to take to his hearth, and who owed
him, in the name of God and the law, “perfect love and obedience.” As
to the wife, she was, so to speak, stepping into a railway train driven
without her assistance. She had paid her fare, and wedlock stretched
itself rigidly in front of her like the driver’s footboard, a place for
manliness and nerve, but unromantic in the extreme. What matters to
her the scenery along the line? The rippling sea may chant its amorous
strains, the spring sun may dot the wilds with flowers, the tempest may
sweep through the gorges, but the track stretches on and on in its direct
unswerving course, with never a thrill, never a smile, unfaltering,
unreflecting, mathematically.
What was the wife but the principal servant, or the eldest of the
children? She only addressed her master with the most profound respect.
“Sir,” she would say to him, or “My good friend.” She was his “wife and
subject”; if she wrote to him she signed, “your humble obedient handmaid
and friend.” But her husband spoke to her stick in hand.
The stick! that was the only argument the women understood.
Bon cheval, mauvais cheval, veut l’esperon,
Bonne femme, mauvaise femme, veut le baston.[98]
Preachers spoke of the thrashings with a smile. Needless to say, the
police did not interfere. Margaret of France did indeed think it a little
vexatious that a lady honoured with the king’s attentions like the
beautiful Madame de Chateaubriand should still receive correction of this
sort under her husband’s roof-tree.
But this was not all: the authority of the husband was often coupled with
the tyranny of the mother-in-law. The husband’s mother, especially if she
was a widow, rendered life horribly galling and difficult.
On the other hand, the married woman, no matter to what lengths her
husband might carry his ill-usage, knew well that there was no redress
for her anywhere. Unhappy wives sometimes in the madness of despair fled
from their homes in the most shocking plight, only to be remorselessly
dragged back by their father, brother, or cousins, as a result of the
appalling freemasonry between men. To rely on her own mother was out of
the question for a wife; the two women belonged to two distinct houses,
with a barrier, a great gulf fixed between them. In the early days of
wedlock a husband, not to appear a tyrant, and because he was in no way
inconvenienced, would allow his wife now and then to visit her mother;
but he contrived that these visits became gradually rarer, and when he
was not at home, a wife careful of her repose and dignity would never
cross her mother’s threshold without first writing to him: “If it be your
good pleasure, I would fain go.”
That was a woman’s life. As it was not all smiles and rosewater, there
was good reason for marrying the girls off early, before they had learned
to care one way or another, their equipment being a few simple maxims
inculcating obedience, and some odds and ends of medical knowledge. Wives
who owed their training to Vivès could not but be very unhappy, according
to the principles of marriage held by Vivès himself. For Vivès not merely
approved of early marriages, he was also one of those who believed that
the wife was created for the husband, and an irresponsible and inferior
being; he looked at the husband as someone to bring her out. Erasmus,
Bouchet, Dolce himself, nay, everybody had much the same impression.
The supremacy of the husband was the sacred ark; bold indeed would be
the person who dared lift a hand to it! So in modern times we have seen
aesthetes, like Ruskin, capable of every possible audacity but that.
Ruskin does not understand women, and yet he has gone out of his way to
exalt their rôle in the world; but, as soon as he comes face to face with
the husband, he loses countenance, his candour vanishes, his words become
cold and colourless.
How is one to explain this singular phenomenon, that so many good and
even generous-minded men, after expressing a heart-felt sympathy with the
sufferings of women, after proclaiming their intelligence and their right
to live, falter and hide their heads when the question of liberty at home
is raised? It is not because they believe there is no more to be said. La
Rochefoucauld declares that “there are few good wives but are tired of
their calling,” to which it would be easy to reply, “There are few good
wives whose calling is not tiring.” But what is to be done? No one is
inclined to go like Plato to the root of the matter and suppress marriage
altogether. Marriage obviously necessitates a husband; it is a vexatious,
clogging, disagreeable necessity, maybe, but there are no visible means
of escaping it. A wife too is necessary; well, once a man and woman are
united in wedlock, one of the two must needs hold the reins. There are
many reasons, even physical ones, why a woman should not undertake to
earn bread for the family and to flog the husband. And so the husband
retains that right.
But if we go a little deeper into the psychology of domestic life in the
sixteenth century, we shall note other important phenomena, pointing to a
different conclusion.
To begin with, investigating facts from the outside, who was it that
complained of marriage? The man; always the man. In actual working
the woman found compensations, or at least advantages in it. For her
it was a state leading to boundless possibilities if only she cared to
open the door. The more ardent paladins of feminism, indeed, were often
disconcerted by her outwardly conciliatory attitude towards it. But the
husband, married though he was, could not forget that setting up an
establishment had involved the turning his back upon life. His chains
appeared to him, if not heavy (to him they were not heavy), at any rate
the sign of a monotonous, unvarying servitude. In the words of an old
ballad, the monk may change his order, the canon his stall, the official
his functions,
But we that be poor married men
Can neither go up nor down.
If we enquire of the spouses themselves, we find that the disagreements
and difficulties rarely sprang from the larger facts—those that were
regarded as irreparable.
Heaven seems to have taken care to arm us, in regard to important
questions, with a veritable long-suffering. There are fools, it is
true, who seriously think of keeping their wives under lock and key,
not reflecting that no better means could be devised for making them
desperate and leaving them at the mercy of Tom, Dick or Harry—the first
passing officer. Such men only get their deserts. But there are also
shrewd men who keep their eyes shut to what it is best not to see:
everybody advises them to do so, or, what is better, gives them every
assistance. There must be a special providence, even, watching over the
wives.[99] A wife, on the contrary, can hardly remain in ignorance of
her husband’s laxities, for these most often manifest themselves in the
broad daylight, and sometimes under his own roof. Many stories might be
told about chambermaids such as we read of in Scripture, but a little
too mercenary, to be sure: for the courts showed so much generosity in
assessing the damages due in such circumstances that artless little
Chloes have been known to bamboozle the judges and profit handsomely by a
mishap that was wholly imaginary.
In Italy, men of the world had a sure and simple custom, which consisted
merely in buying a young slave-girl. In the market of Venice, a pretty
Russian, a fair Circassian, a well-built Tartar girl between twenty-five
and thirty years of age would fetch from six to eighty-seven ducats.
It needs no showing how well this institution was suited to platonism;
the most eminent platonists did not disdain it. The mother of Carlo de’
Medici was a lovely Circassian girl, purchased in this way by the grave
and aesthetic Cosimo. It would never have occurred to a wife to desert
her home for such a grievance as this; to do so would have made her a
general laughing-stock. She might feel keen inward suffering; perhaps her
heart would close a little more towards the earth and open out towards
heaven; but this experience would be of use to her, and a woman who was
genuinely an idealist would almost rejoice at it. It would teach her to
show a firm and lofty front to the world, to live among her ideals, to
form a low estimate of men.
Domestic quarrels really spring from the crabbed sour virtues, the
insufferable respectabilities. Men are hard to please. One moment they
find a wife in the way: the next they expect her to be perfect. She
ought every morning, as an old author explains, to put on the slippers
of humility, the shift of decorum, the corset of chastity, the garters
of steadfastness, the pins of patience, and so on; but it is by no means
proved that in such a case a husband would not think his wife a little
over-dressed.
The wife, too, is up in arms about mere trifles—her husband’s
commonplace soul, his narrowness, his materialism, his egotism, his
gross old-bachelor ways. Her real grievances, to say nothing of her
fancied ones, are innumerable. One woman finds, instead of the “morning
dew” of her dreams, that she has espoused a lumpish lout.[100] Another,
brought up in a part of the country where hunting was the stock topic
of conversation, feels aggrieved if her husband tries to engage her
practical interest in literature or music, the result of which is so
complete a discord that the husband at last packs her off to her father,
who promptly sends her back again. Another lady is wretched because her
good man loses his appetite, and in bed does nothing but sigh; on this
foundation she builds a whole world of suppositions, and finishes by
making life impossible to the poor man, who is all the time at a loss to
know why: as a matter of fact, he has been worried about an investment.
There are some women odious because of their incessant chattering, their
tempers, their vanity. Many women are desperately fond of contradicting
their husbands, tormenting them with pin-pricks. At table a husband
inadvertently poured water into his wife’s glass. The lady handed the
glass to a footman, saying hotly: “When it is dry, I will ask for it
back.”[101] These are the things which destroy domestic happiness, which
poison a man’s life (“wine and women have their poison,” says an old
proverb), which disgust and shrivel the heart of a woman and drive her
to a life away from her home, in pilgrimages or what not. A man does not
need to be a saint to bear with a woman of easy virtue, but only a saint
can endure a wearing woman.
And so what is wanted in domestic life is a great deal of prudence and
wisdom, and as little as possible of illusions and passion. Marriage
is the most sacred bond in the world, but only so long as it is not
strained. To yield to the temptation of loving would be fraught with
great peril; that is the forbidden fruit. Champier, a philosophical
physician of the time, calls it fatal: it kills. Leaving out of account
the physical vicissitudes of life, the spirit of man is too fickle to
permit him safely to stake his life on one head.[102] Of this, Europe had
a terrifying proof.
Philip the Fair was a notorious lady-killer; and his wife Joanna, like
a genuine Spaniard, loved him to distraction. On one occasion when he
was travelling in the Netherlands, she worried herself into a sort of
prostration. One wild, bitter night, as November nights are in Navarre,
this poor Joanna, seized with a sudden hallucination, rushed out
half-clad into the courtyard of the castle of Medina del Campo. People
hurried up to her, and the governor stopped her and ordered the gate to
be shut; but the unhappy woman, her eyes starting from her head, clung
to the gate, and no human strength could tear her away. When morning
came she was still there, panting and shivering, with wild, sunken eyes.
Her mother, Queen Isabella, who was lying ill at Segovia, despatched an
admiral and an archbishop in hot haste to the castle, but neither the
archbishop nor the admiral succeeded in getting the poor mad thing away
from her gate. They only managed, with great difficulty, to induce her
to enter an adjacent shelter for the following night. Only the Queen was
able to put an end to this distressing scene, the memory of which thrills
Spain to this day. Yes, La Bruyère has well said: “Women go to extremes!
They are better or worse than we.” There lies their danger. They would
assuredly do well to beware of their ecstasies, and to keep above or
below the husband with whom it is their lot to live.
If they are reasonable and resigned, like those of whom we have to
speak, not believing in the necessity of a matrimonial passion, then the
humanists resume their dulcet strains. They have no intention of bringing
about a violent rupture, but make their appeal to finesse.
The old type of the hectoring husband, even with his bludgeon, is no
longer a terror. No one is so likely to play a puppet’s part as the man
who fancies he is monarch of all he surveys. The foolish fellow is so
convinced of his superiority that he never perceives the slender cords
by which he is led. He works like an ox,[103] and his wife calls him a
selfish beast and curmudgeon. She croaks of the workhouse if things
are not going well with him, while if everything is going smoothly she
“cockers and cossets him,” and then gets, not a beating, but a dress or
a blouse. She has tears or smiles as occasion serves, and, if need be,
practises her blandishments on the friends of the dear man. She wheedles
even Heaven itself, for all that is required to ensure peace is to bring
the shirt that her lord and master is to wear on Sunday into contact
with the altar during Friday’s mass, and there is no difficulty in that.
It is commonly said that “a woman is easy to manage provided ’tis a man
that takes the trouble”; a man is still easier to manage provided a woman
is good enough to take him in hand. In short, the women had long before
this quietly juggled away this harassing domestic problem. That is why,
despite the bogey of principles, the women thought highly of marriage.
They reconciled themselves to obedience, so long as they did not obey.
For the same reason the warmest friends of women found no better means
of combating marriage than to defend it. The men alone girded at it,
because, accustomed in their bachelor days to eat their own cake, they
did not easily get into the habit of working for a little community.
Erasmus has very cleverly summed up the situation in the form of a
dialogue between a young bride and a matron of sense and sobriety.[104]
The former makes loud outcry. “What a hell is marriage!” she exclaims,
“what a slave’s business! And for whom, ye gods! For a gambler, a brute,
a rake! ’Twould be better far to sleep with a pig!”
The other soothes her. She must take her husband as she finds him, that
is to say, a coarse animal, a sort of elephant, to be tamed with a lump
of sugar.[105] She must appear to give in to him about trifles, to put
up with some of his whims and eccentricities, and above all to lay in a
large stock of good temper and never be idle or dull, for the husband
has a perfect horror of being bored, perhaps because he is such a bore
himself, and sulkiness upsets him, especially if he is sulky. What
she must do is to leave him what he has, and give him what he lacks,
those charming possessions with which the new system of civilisation
has endowed women. She may even add a little affection, and then, one
fine day, she will be struck with astonishment (for men do not shine at
finesse) to see this rough husband of hers at her feet, and, instead of
considering her a nonentity, taking her for the image of God. From that
moment she possesses the affection she has sought; and the task is not
very difficult.
Truth compels us to add, however, that, apart from this moral recipe,
another circumstance contributed to give the women greater importance in
conjugal life. In France, as in every country where men are the ruling
spirits, they were not fond of giving the girls a dowry, or at all events
they gave them the smallest possible allowance. When the girls married,
they received a sum representing in a way what would some years before
have been called their “night-cap,” but what was then styled a “chaplet
of roses,” and they renounced all claim on the inheritance. Accordingly
a rich man did not think it at all extraordinary to wed a girl without a
fortune, since that was the usual thing. Louis de la Trémoille married
Gabrielle de Bourbon on those terms. Further, there was not the same
difference between large, middling and small fortunes as there is to-day.
With an income of three or four thousand livres, equal to £3000 or £4000
to-day, a man was thought a nabob. The husband, then, brought the money,
and in addition he guaranteed a contingent jointure on his own property,
so that it was really a home of his providing that the woman entered.
A man in those days knew nothing of that pride now universally felt in
wedding a millionaire’s daughter from Cincinnati, or even from Paris.
To marry money struck people as shameful, almost infamous. A husband
supported on his wife’s income was the object of heartfelt commiseration,
and an establishment so organised seemed unworthy of the name. No
sarcasm was keen enough for the classical “son-in-law of Monsieur
Poirier,”[106] the dapper lordling, all genealogy and sport, whose sole
accomplishment is a knack of plunging deep into debt, from which his
worthy father-in-law (who made his money in treacle) toils behind the
scenes to extricate him.
On the contrary, Monsieur Poirier was highly esteemed in industrial
countries—the Low Countries, for example, while as to the Italians,
they, openly and unashamed, regarded big dowries as at once legitimate
and desirable. They had the courage of their opinion—for instance, that
physician of Pistoja who had to choose between two girls, one of whom was
warranted a sensible creature, while the other was less sensible, but
richer by three hundred crowns. The doctor did not hesitate an instant
in choosing the richer, for in his opinion the risks were equal, and
the difference pointed out between them was not worth a few crowns. No
Italian was at all loth to marry a woman who brought him a dowry large
enough to live on. At Florence fifty crowns a year would almost keep a
household of moderate tastes, and a woman of the lower middle-class as
a rule received a dowry of two or three thousand florins, which yielded
an income of at least a hundred and fifty florins. The Visconti and the
Sforza, by means of dowries which were by all accounts colossal, got
their daughters into the principal royal houses of Europe. In short, the
Italian system continued to exercise a wonderful fascination even over
outsiders, and in starting on the expeditions to Italy more than one
French noble fancied that a rich wife would be the reward of his prowess.
It is not very surprising that these ideas at length overcame all
resistance in France. Louis XI., who was a pupil of the Sforza, did much
in this as in other things to snap the chains of the old traditions. We
have elsewhere related how lightheartedly he made and unmade marriages,
with the sole object of rewarding various adventurers at the expense of
the most honourable families.
Louis XII., on the contrary, set himself passionately to oppose these new
manners. Although he plumed himself on his chivalry as much as anyone, he
did not admit that the heat of passion could excuse the abduction of a
young girl, even if she were rich—and in such cases she was almost always
rich. His firmness did not prevent some picturesque exploits; but the
authority of the church, with its strong weapon the canon laws, lent him
aid.
We have moreover had occasion to show elsewhere how much difficulty
Charles VIII. had, after the event, in getting the legitimacy of his
marriage with the heiress of Brittany acknowledged.[107]
And so it is that, at the epoch of women’s triumph, we find in France
two distinct species of husbands. The first, without shutting their eyes
to the importance of money, refused to make it the principal question
in marriage. Undoubtedly it was unfortunate if the wife came quite
empty-handed, and in such a case a girl ran some risk of the “pain”
of remaining an old maid or falling into an unhappy plight. The most
insignificant workgirl set her heart on getting a little dower together,
even by methods not altogether innocent,[108] and we know that the
purses of princesses dribbled out a beneficent response to this desire.
But many marrying men were quite content to be fobbed off with some sort
of equivalent. Thus Louis XII. created François de Melun Count of Epinay
to induce him to marry Louise de Foix; and Louis de la Trémoille gave
twelve hundred livres to his servant, Robert Suriete, to compensate him
for the portionless condition of a pretty girl, Marie de Briethe.
The other kind of husband, which was destined more and more to outnumber
the first, saw in money, on the contrary, the real, substantial element
of wedlock. Anyone who thought that a woman would appreciate a sacrifice
made to marry her struck them as egregiously simple. The richer women
are, the better they are, as Montaigne says: there is no reason why
a man should sacrifice positive “commodities” to uncertain (and not
particularly useful) quantities such as birth, beauty, virtue, wit.
The ball once set rolling spun along merrily. Especially in Italy, the
exploitation of marriage attained imposing proportions. Indignant fathers
of families protested; the Venetian senate, composed mainly of fathers,
passed various decrees more and more restrictive, contemptuous and
scathing, but all in vain. The whole class of idle young men of fashion,
and it was a numerous one, avowedly regarded marriage as a unique means
of enriching themselves and assuring an idle life, a charmingly easy
means, too, not above the level of the meanest intelligence. Guez de
Balsac likened it to a fat prebend which does not require the holder to
become actually a canon, but which does unhappily necessitate occasional
residence.
This custom does not perhaps indicate very warm feelings on the part
of the young men, but it cannot be denied that it satisfied the secret
wishes of the women and gave a sanction to the evolution of their ideas.
From the day when they pay the household expenses, women consider
the parts reversed, and begin by assuming the most perfect liberty.
Henceforth no more constraint, no more subterfuges, no more Judas
kisses. They are now, mark you, equal[109] or superior to their husband
in those material concerns which are the essence of domesticity; and
as moreover they fancy that morally they excel the men, that they are
at once more affectionate, more chaste and more steadfast; as they are
reminded on all sides of the example of paragons like Cleopatra, they
make up their minds to be Cleopatras too. They consent, out of goodness
of soul, to try their prentice hand on their husbands. They make him
happy, sometimes even in his own despite; they are going to transform him
“from a battered ingot or a base coin into a new crown piece.” In his
heart of hearts the husband may fret and fume, call to mind the old-time
ways, wonder at his wife’s continual absences from home and her choice
of friends, and at times even try to interfere; but he is quickly given
to understand that my lady is not going to be held in a leash or shut up
in a band-box, that seraglios exist no longer. She will devote herself
to his happiness, provided he shows himself docile and recognises his
incapacity and helplessness. Ay, and let him reflect: how could he get
on without so virtuous a wife? He would go into a consumption. She is
there, regulating his expenses, his pleasures, the frets and sallies of
his temperament; she watches like a sister of mercy over his physical and
moral well-being, and it is by this means that the household represents
henceforth a unity, sound, robust, with two bodies, four arms, and two
souls.
Obviously (to repeat it once more), we have no intention of enunciating
an absolute rule. In speaking of households, we do not mean that all the
households in France were cast in the same mould, and that everywhere at
the same moment they were all acting precisely in the same way. No two
were alike.
The truth is that, one way or another, a very large number of women no
longer suffered themselves to be snuffed out, “trodden under foot,” to
use the current phrase. As to the manner in which their controlling
influence showed itself, that depended on events, tastes, how the wind
blew, circumstances. A favourite idea of Margaret of France, and
one which it would have been difficult to get out of her head, was
that women always err by their meek and quiet spirit, their excess of
long-suffering. In vain is the reply made that more than one woman
makes a virtue of necessity, and that, face to face with a violent
creature threatening to break every bone in her body, a woman needs all
her patience; Margaret protests that she would rather be flogged than
despised. This magnificent declaration sets some of the company smiling,
and enraptures the women. One pert widow alleges that she loved her
husband so much that if he had beaten her she would have killed him. “In
other words,” retorts Henri d’Albret, “you mean to rule the roost. Well,
I am agreeable, but you would have to get all the husbands to agree.”
Margaret winces under this intellectual cut; she is put out, for natural
as she would regard it for her husband to take her orders, she dares not
say so. Even she falters, and admits that the man is the natural head,
but not that he has a right to desert or maltreat his wife.[110] Can this
be Margaret? Yes, the words are her own, and are exactly to the point.
Women do lack decision—and she was the very first to show it!
Some young ladies, to elude this difficulty, thought it well to marry
a ninny—if not an absolute fool. Worthy folk were amazed and sang the
praises of mind and its attractions, “the treasures of knowledge,” and
asked them what pleasure they promised themselves. What a question to
ask! Why, since a husband was in question, they promised themselves
precisely no pleasure; nothing but money, or a name! That was how
the Duchess of Medina-Sidonia married; she espoused an income of
sixty-thousand ducats, with a grandee of Spain. True, this grandee,
when paying a visit to the archbishop, asked very politely to see the
children! There was nothing here to hinder the duchess from having as
much mind as she wanted. But it must be confessed that this was an
extreme remedy, and it would be preferable for a woman to feel and
believe herself able to mate with a man of intelligence.
Domestic manners thus underwent a profound transformation. In humble
homes the wife continued perforce to cook, to make the beds, to wash
her husband’s head and feet, with no loss of dignity. But in the great
houses, it was no longer common to find hard inelegant matrons who rose
with the sun, were continually chevying the children and servants, and
knew no pleasure but the joy of piling up well-bleached and well-darned
linen on Saturday, the housewife’s field-day. As Fourier has pointedly
observed, disdain of such mole-eyed habits is the test of a people’s
progress in civilisation.
It is much more delightful to float through life with a smile on the
lips, and to govern imperceptibly, by means of a languorous Creole grace.
Such grace abounded, and many instances of it might be given. Here is a
specimen which seems to us characteristic; it is a simple little note
from Isabella d’Este[111] to her husband, dictated to a secretary:
“My Lord,
Prithee mock not at my letter, nor say that all women are poor
things and ever smitten with fear, for the malignity of others
far exceedeth my fear and your lordship’s mettle. I should have
written this letter with my own hand, but ’tis so hot that,
if it last, we are like to die. The little knave is very well
and sendeth a kiss to your lordship, and as for me, I do ever
commend myself to you.
Longing to see your lordship,
ISABELLA, with my own hand.”
Mantua, July 23rd.
“With my own hand,” the signature and no more. It is so hot! But does
not this very air of fragility convey a charm exactly of the kind to
subjugate even a husband?
This charm does enfold him—and it keeps husband and wife apart! Seen at a
distance these distinguished women, genuinely Stoic at heart under a mask
of _abandon_, in reality overawed their lords and masters, and, even in
their private intercourse with them, kept themselves shrouded in mystery
and the unknown. Vittoria Colonna’s husband, who took little pains to be
agreeable at home,[112] became so devoted a lover of his lawful spouse
when far away as to compose in her honour a whole volume of charming
verses entitled _A Book of Loves_. This book was never published, and
has disappeared. Brantôme keenly regrets its disappearance, because,
he says, it would have given us an opportunity to see the poetry of
conjugal love, and to know if that ought to draw its inspiration from
platonic sentiments or not—from celestial love or from love legitimately
terrestrial.
Poor Brantôme! We think we can solve the question which troubles him.
The women of that time were waxing philosophic, they had set their minds
towards acquiring a good deal of knowledge and yet remaining alive,
instead of minimising themselves, humbling themselves, following behind
like a boat in tow. They had become vestals (if we may put it thus) in
regard to marriage, and considered that their true mission was to shed
abroad the love which welled over from their quivering hearts; for it is
always the lack of men that turns women into feminists. In the world they
were going to become “goddesses,” and it would be impossible any longer
to live without them.
Francis I., in a court without women, found himself getting too proud and
despotic; his gardens appeared to him “flowerless,” so he summoned and
enticed young women to him, and treated them “like goddesses in heaven.”
He shewed them their new mission.
And yet, what unsuspected depths of loathing rose to the lips of those
divine women! I do not know whether the number of women sick of their
husbands was larger than at present, but it was large enough. Pride and a
high sentiment of duty in the gaze of the world long watched over them,
like those grand statues of splendid, almost menacing virtues which the
sculptors of former days were fond of setting before a tomb, at either
end of the grave. But after they had accomplished, unostentatiously,
devotedly, the mission for which men married them, namely, kept the house
in order, loyally studied the master’s comfort, poulticed and physicked
him, borne him children, replenished the stock (pardon the expression)
like good brood-mares, and humbly occupied the foot of the table, there
came a time when this primary duty was done, and then they sprang up as
though from a sleep, and looking at the sun, enquired of him whither they
must fly to find life. They were born to sow flowers behind them. Their
children were these flowers, painfully plucked out of their very vitals
and flung into the future. It remained yet to pluck from their hearts,
with a more vivifying joy, immaterial flowers, flowers of love, flowers
of happiness, children of the soul, their real children, for if the woman
is a passive being in physical conception, in spiritual conception she
plays another part, she becomes the active being. The seed is hers to sow.
By this time they were no longer at the “angelic age,” as Alfred de
Vigny called it, namely, fifteen years. As a rule, they might confess to
thirty, the age when women have “a spice of the devil,” the age at which
one ought to know how to deal with soul and heart.
The sort of revolution they brought about was no new thing. There always
had been and always will be women of thirty years, quite aware of their
age; but these were in addition keen-sighted, psychological women, who
meant to get to the bottom of the phenomenon and measure its intensity
with the eye of a connoisseur, for it seemed to them that they were
entering into life.
The children, who had been the _raison d’être_ of the home, were about
to go out into the world, or had already gone. As soon as he could,
the first-born son, that dear little boy whom the mother loved, asked
and obtained a little money and disappeared. Henceforth he was hardly
mentioned; he now had his own affairs, his own pleasures, and when he
wrote it would be a postscript, affectionate but rather concise: “Madam,
I had forgotten to write and say I have learnt that you have given me a
little brother named Guy. I beseech you, Madam, see him well nourished,
for I love him well.” Sometimes news came that, far away, Death had
rudely snapped the last remaining tie, and from the truly heroic words
which then burst from certain courageous mothers’ hearts, we see how
hardened their souls had become, and how the noblest and most dearly
loved of them had been compelled, in their thorny life, to form the
painful but admirable habit of sacrificing their affections to the very
uttermost. Gabrielle de Bourbon was announcing to her officers the death
of her only son, killed at Marignan. Aloud she said: “in this battle that
the King has won”; but in a whisper she added: “which has brought such
heavy woe upon us.”
That sweet women whose very nature is to love should go out, when all
fails them thus, into the world, like the bees of God, to gather a little
honey and labour for the common hive, is not very surprising. They prefer
“a little love from many to a great deal from one,”[113]—especially when
that one does not love them!
And so marriage comes to serve them as a refuge when on their
honey-quest. It is like the lodge in which hunters take up their
quarters, to be nearer their game and to shelter themselves from the
weather. The women rejoice at having it. Nevertheless, before studying
these emancipated women as they play their part manlike away from home,
we have still to examine a final objection of principle, which was strong
enough to hold some of them back.
Many moralists, even without bias against feminism, reproach the women
with owing their philanthropy to a horror of marriage; according to them,
the mission to the world upon which the women wished to enter was for
them a means of evading their domestic duties.
That is not the fact. Without appealing to the obvious arguments, we
wish for no other proof of the women’s good intentions than their very
manifest desire not to carry their separation from their husbands beyond
a certain point. They did mean to render their bonds lighter, and even
elastic. But, as we have already seen, they defended the institution of
marriage and affectionately tended their husbands in sickness; and it is
certain that they had no wish to lose them.
Divorce originated in the masculine countries. It appeared a step in
advance, because hitherto public opinion had shown itself singularly
cruel in regard to separated wives. There was neither pity nor justice
for them. The husband had no shame in deserting his wife, and it was
always she who was blamed.
To put a stop to separations, the Senate of Venice, evidently convinced
that as men they were not there for nothing, prescribed in 1543 a system
which was simplicity itself. All separated women were metaphorically
to be buried in a heap; they were forced to wear a special costume
like lepers, and were forbidden access to any public place. The clergy
revolted. In the end, the august Senate contented itself with a milder
punishment; it placed the unfortunate women under the surveillance, not
of the state police, but of their ex-husbands.
But a time came when the Venetian measures no longer appeared feasible,
and then in the countries where men ruled opinion it was generally
admitted that woman, being a secondary creature, needed an owner and
employer. Instead of trampling upon her when she found herself without
a master, they deigned to do her so much justice as to provide her with
a new lord. Calvin, generous soul, permitted her, in case of proved
desertion, to take another mate.
In the Roman countries, deserted wives were objects of compassion. But
marriage remained indissoluble; there was no remarriage; and a woman in a
country where women were a force had nothing to gain by placing herself
in a false position. All that Roman charity could do was to throw open
houses of refuge where she might find a retreat in honour and solitude.
The true way of getting rid of a husband was to keep him.
Nor did the women, even the more philosophic of them, find any
substantial advantage in being widows.
Certainly we must make some deductions from the rather theatrical
demonstrations customary at death-beds. The custom was an old one, dating
from the time when it was agreed that in losing her master a woman lost
her all; these poor women were stricken to the heart-core, and thrilled
with an emotion half comic, half touching. That was their manner of
receiving their liberty; it seemed as though they had nothing left them
but to die themselves, especially if they were young, and for some time
everyone seemed of that opinion. In lugubrious and lachrymose tones
their friends would remind them of overpoweringly wonderful examples:
Artemisia, who drank her husband’s ashes in a cup of water; Portia,
Cato’s daughter and wife of Brutus, who, on learning of her husband’s
death, finding no knife at hand, did not seek one but swallowed live
coals. Those who had simply opened a vein or cut their throat, or who had
without ado plunged a dagger in their heart, were past numbering. We can
realise what delicacy, what aristocratic charm there was in the Indian
widow’s suttee.
But for her children, who after reconciling her to marriage reconciled
her to life, Louise of Savoy would have died on the corpse of her
husband; so, at least, Jean de Saint-Gelais, her chamberlain, assures
us, and he was suspected, only too reasonably, of over-familiarity with
the secret tastes of his mistress. But for her religious scruples the
beautiful Isabella Richisentia had killed herself on the body of Raymond
de Cardoña.[114] Bouchet and Moncetto, nicknamed Lycurgus, deliberated in
great distress of mind whether they should persuade Mary of England[115]
to live, after the death of Louis XII.; they reminded her of Lucrece,
Penelope and others, and Moncetto wore himself out in speaking of them to
her in every known language and in verse. But for the young Englishman
she espoused only a fortnight later, Mary, perhaps, would have died.
As a rule these widows, like reasonable creatures, at last made up their
minds to live, under pressure from those about them; but it was also
customary for them to display at least gorgeous mourning finery.[116]
Let us first see how they buried their husbands.
There were quiet women like Anne of France who contented themselves with
the celebration of a very impressive service, and to all appearance shed
no tears, for they spoke neither of drinking the powdered bones of the
dead man nor of spending the rest of their life in the bed of the dear
departed. Anne of France indeed considered these proceedings as “useless,
unworthy and detestable follies”; the only mourning that appealed to her
was simple, silent and lasting. But more than once people were staggered
at the quantity of tears women’s eyes could contain. “Vainly do they
tear their cheeks and dishevel their hair; I go off and enquire of a
chambermaid or of a secretary how they were, how they lived together. We
would much rather they laughed at our death, if they would but smile on
us while we live.”[117]
A Spanish lady, the Countess of Consentana, in officially notifying
her vassals of the death of her husband, signed herself, “The sad and
unfortunate countess,” and, the better to indicate her distress, she
dropped two ink-blots where her name should have come. The facetious
vassals replied to their “sad and more than very unfortunate countess” in
an address which, in their agitation, they all signed with enormous daubs
and flourishes. Spain smiled, from Bilbao to Gibraltar.
So a widow left nothing undone to show how much she deplored her
solitary condition. To this first conclusion we must add a second not
less manifest: almost every widow strove earnestly to regard her husband
as alive, so true is it that her aim was to act under the shadow of a
husband as little in her way as she in his.
Of all the species of husbands, the dead husband is the one who would
require the most special monograph. However little heroic his life
may have been, his widow made it her business to sing his praises in
public. A woman whose married life had notoriously been one of discreet
indifference, if not of discord, would spend her nights and days in
celebrating the glory and the memory of the dead man. So profoundly would
she identify herself with him in heart that ere long she would develop
into the widow of a great man and rise into a superior atmosphere. The
greatnesses which the deceased perhaps never possessed she first gave
him and then appropriated herself, and in the fire of this love she was
gradually consumed. Besides, sometimes she happened actually to have got
past the age for love.
Margaret of France consoled herself frankly enough for the loss of the
Duke of Alençon; but Vittoria Colonna never ceased to address sonnets
to her captain, and when she was urged to marry again, her reply was
simple: “My husband Ferdinand, who to you seems dead, is not dead to me.”
Diana of Poitiers manipulated this principle of “beyond the grave” with
wonderful dexterity: she never was a widow. Her husband was dead, to be
sure, but she displayed as her device an evergreen tree-stem springing
from a tomb, with the words: “Left alone, she lives in him.” As late
as 1558, at the moment of her greatest worldly triumphs, she remained
faithful to him.
Here, then, we have reached a second and a very important point: a woman
of the world, so to speak, had her husband’s soul packed in straw (like
her china), and in principle she always considered herself as a wife.
In regard to the employment of their widowhood the widows fall into two
classes. First there was the widow of the classical traditional school,
who no longer belonged to the world, but buried herself in her maternal
duties or in charitable work. She was only a survival of the old-style
housewife, of whom a good many were produced even in the sixteenth
century. For example there was Anne of Polignac, who, in her retreat
at Verteuil, where she divided her time between her children and a
splendid library, amazed the Emperor Charles V. with her well-regulated
and dignified life. Again, there was Charlotte d’Albret, the widow of
Caesar Borgia; she was a little more worldly, and by nature fond of show,
splendid plate, magnificent jewels, and a large retinue.
These widows were administrators of the first order; so far as the
interests of the family were concerned, it was an advantage, as a proverb
ran, “for the husband to go first to earth.” They excelled in getting
full value for their money; sometimes even they were not averse to
dabbling in usury: Charlotte d’Albret rather liked it. It would certainly
not have been safe to reckon on their alleged feebleness; some of them
were of mettle enough to mount the ramparts like Catherine Sforza. After
the death of Grisegonelle Frottier, various relatives of his conspired
to capture by force of arms the manor of Blanc which belonged to him.
His widow, Françoise d’Amboise, learning of their plot, immediately
appealed to the “picaulx,” a brotherhood of Poitevin knights who were
vowed to protect widows and orphans; and instead of leaving her cause to
the halting march of justice, she organised an expedition and overthrew
her adversaries. In spite of the rather energetic character of the
proceeding, Louis XI. was touched, and willingly gave his pardon.
The most of these good widows spent a part of their life in convent
chapels, and it was in this direction that a breach was made in their
spirit of economy, for, according to pious authors, the devil worms his
way through the vestry door. They would meet there a lay brother, charged
with the duty of nurturing simple souls into fruitfulness. Beginning by
sending some delicious tarts in exchange for a _De Profundis_, the ladies
would by degrees make up their minds to found a chapel, then to have it
decorated, then to endow it.
Or they received charming letters from the good nuns: “We are poor women
whom your departure has left in distress, and we may say that we have
lost all the good of life.... We are still wearing the cloaks you made
for us, and we are going without pelisses, as our custom is. The convent
has not changed since you left us ... except it be that we suffer cruelly
from cold during the winter.”[118]
Many grave and strong-minded widows, after having mingled in affairs,
took advantage of their widowhood only to forget a world in which their
heart had not found sustenance. So soon as they had fulfilled unavoidable
duties, it was a pleasure to them to distribute their property and retire
from the world. We can hardly realise how the vision of a few sweet,
peaceful years consecrated to the soul haunted the hearts of women whom
the evil star of too high birth had flung into political affairs.
Such was the end Margaret of Austria[119] would have desired.
Such was actually the end of two exquisite princesses of the house of
Lorraine: Margaret of Lorraine, duchess of Alençon, who first connected
herself with a hospital, then with the strict order of the Poor Clares;
and Philippa of Gueldres, who entered the same sisterhood when her son
ascended the throne. She lived with them for twenty-seven years in the
deepest humility, styling herself “a worm of the soil,” though her
companions might continue to call her “our reverend Mother the Queen.”
The new generation was to see little of these sublime modesties. The
majority of widows lived in the world; but what liberty they enjoyed
they bought very dear, and on the whole they had less liberty than
wives. They were gay and did not darken too often the vestry-door;
they did not flaunt the time-honoured widow’s cap, still dear to
Englishwomen—headgear that would disgust anybody with widowhood. Was that
a crime? By no means; and yet the slightest slip or suspicion of a slip
was in them unpardonable. Men saw in every widow either a naughty woman
or a hypocrite, and they did not shrink from saying so. A physician was
once bargaining for a mule in the presence of a fair widow, and said
he: “I want one that’s a widow”: and as the dealer did not understand
him, he added: “Yes, a widow, that is, plump, and light on her heels,
and a good feeder.” The saying ran: “If a man thinks his wife a little
too thin, he had better make her a widow.” A widow was regarded only as
so much raw material; and from the moment when “Goodman Danger” was no
longer at hand, sin itself seemed to lose its sweetness. Widows were
recommended to frequent none but deserted chapels, to contemplate the
crucifix during the night. This condescending pity sprang sometimes from
good-heartedness; but it was often odious to them, and all the more so
because everyone, even the most confidential servants, fancied they
had a right to throw in their sympathetic suggestions. Anne of France
was indignant at this universal treason, which shocked her sense of
right.[120]
And yet society added one more tyranny. For a widow to marry again was
scarcely tolerated.[121] She would have been just as severely chided
for finding a second husband as she would have been for not finding a
first.[122] She would be sooner forgiven for a frailty, a yielding to
temptation, than for contracting a new tie. What woman was this who had
not had too much of one husband, and was not amply satisfied? Among
the people she was favoured with a sort of skimmington ride. Margaret
of France defied the prejudice and married again: it was in sooth the
deed of a philosophic woman. But in general, widows were still chained
to their widowhood by various considerations; in the first place, the
practical difficulty of finding another husband. Men were quite ready to
court a widow, but very few would make the sacrifice involved in marrying
her. A woman no longer young, a “shelled peascod,” who no longer had
anything to give and had settled habits of her own, was the antipodes
of the little maiden of twelve so much in request. Besides, the widow
herself was enjoying a large and tranquil life, thanks to the jointure
of which a second marriage would deprive her; sometimes the whole of
her husband’s fortune had come to her on condition that she devoted
herself to the children. She held in all matters the authority which had
belonged to the dead man, and indeed it was not uncommon for the husband
expressly to bequeath her this authority in his will.[123] The drawback
to this life of business management is precisely that a woman loses in it
something of the bloom of her grace and sweetness, she no longer needs
to employ persuasiveness and love since she has force at her disposal,
and the result is that she becomes a sort of man, and acquires some
of the defects by which she has suffered at the hands of her husband.
We can thus understand quite well that a woman who wishes to remain a
woman will do her best, for her own security and charm’s sake, to live
under the fostering wing of a precious memory, and will cherish with the
utmost devotion her (so to speak) posthumous husband. There lies her real
strength.
The Renaissance woman, then, a woman of essentially fine grain, and well
versed in everything it was her business to know, was a woman of absolute
sincerity, and we must believe her when she speaks well of marriage. She
considered that institution as perfectly reconcilable with the fulfilment
of a mission in the world, indeed as favourable, almost indispensable, to
it. She had no more reason to give up marriage than to give up eating and
drinking: it is not this that enchains the soul. The idealists differed
from the utilitarians solely in the belief that one marriage is enough:
the former covered their faces if a widow, not ethereal enough to satisfy
them, went by on the arm of a new husband; the latter applauded, and
fancied that by this transaction the animal nature was held in check. But
this is of little interest to us. The only result important to note is
that a woman, without ceasing to be a woman, could win freedom for her
affections and her activities as well as a man. When she had attained
that condition of liberty, she ascribed all the honour to marriage, and
blessed it instead of thinking that she owed everything to herself.
Marriage, like many human inventions, is a contrivance capable of
producing either liberty or tyranny, and women had simply altered its
direction.
They wielded intimate and domestic powers. Their rival was not the
husband, they came to terms with him; it was the man who looked after
their body or their soul, and to whom, out of weakness or indolence,
they were led to attach themselves like an anaemic ivy-plant. To mark
their place in this world they had themselves to learn how to obtain
what brings happiness: health of body and of soul. Respected in regard
to the body, it remained for them to gain self-respect in regard to the
soul, and to show that true Christianity consists in bestowing power and
liberty, not in withdrawing them.
BOOK II. LIFE IN THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
Margaret of France said, very incisively: “The defect of women is
timidity.” They are born to fear.
Women had become habituated to a passive and secondary part. They desired
to escape from it, they felt the need of activity and a freer air, their
wings were growing and they adored intellectual liberty, at any rate
they said so—and they had in fact already snapped many of their chains;
but when you come to close quarters and exchange confidences with them,
you perceive that they are still held fast by a multitude of secondary
diffidences, by tenuous invisible threads starting often enough from
social conventions of little or no importance. They are unable to wing
their flight, or they require a man to go first and shew them the way; or
an absolute necessity, an enthusiasm, an impulse of devotion is necessary
to start them off.
They move at last, not through reasoning, but as the result of the more
or less vague sentiment that while their home-life has brought them no
love, yet they are made for love and have a love mission to fulfil.
A modern aesthetic writer—but a man after all and only moderately
sensible—has thus explained the appeal of grace as it affected himself:
“I had nothing to love. For me my parents were in some sort only the
visible powers of Nature.”[124] How much more does this apply to women!
They want something to love! Separated from her family the wife finds in
her husband the incarnation, in the fullest sense of the word, of the
visible power of Nature, and so it is that the ardent instinct drawing
her towards the light is very complex, much interwoven with pain and
passion; it is a thirst for love almost cruel in its intensity. Just as
the husband wins honour for himself by means of external activity and
public service, so the wife hears destiny making a similar appeal to
her. Around her there is a life to diffuse, a sweetness to sow, hungry
folk to feed, wounds to dress, a great cry of distress and hardship to
soothe; and act she must. A tradesman’s wife may shut herself up in the
narrow egotism of her back shop. Could a woman of heart shut her eyes to
the profound unrest of society? Ought she to remain a helpless pawn on
the board, a mere victim? Was she not called to take her share, as an
intelligent and free creature? Willy nilly, she must step forth from her
house—burst her shell and wing away! At twenty it is excusable to confuse
one’s ideals with life; ten or fifteen years later this illusion has
dissolved. One feels then the need of setting one’s heart upon some firm,
sure, noble spot out of reach of the swirling tide of existence; and a
day thus arrives when every woman capable of reflecting and of loving
throws a questioning look on what is around her.
And then, what answer does she get from the great mystery of life?
She sees a gigantic system of force and matter in interaction, set
in motion, working, displaying itself under the silent impulse of an
invisible power, and having neither existence nor beauty apart from an
end external to itself. The governor of this world is man, endowed with
an intelligence more potent than matter, so that he finds himself placed
here below as the ambassador of life and the type of beauty. He himself
obeys practically one only motive power, love; he cannot be strongly
stirred save by passion. Thus the whole world obeys the law of beauty
and of love. Truth and goodness form, so to speak, its skeleton; beauty
is its life; love, the instrument of its life. Certain modern aesthetes,
seeking to establish an antinomy between man and Nature, represent man
as a foe who in employing Nature necessarily violates and deforms her,
whereas left to herself she would be always lovely.[125] To subordinate
man to Nature in this way seems to us untrue and disastrous. Surely the
contrary is the case: we may put anything to wrong uses, but material
forces cannot but gain if we direct them aright. Our part is to live in
harmony with Nature, conformably to the magnificent and universal law
that love grows by spending itself. “Go and give all your goods to feed
the poor,” says the Gospel: that is nobility! Sow, give: give always!
Give the labour of the arm to the fields as yet sterile; give your heart
to hearts that are dull and dead! Beauty and niggardliness cannot live
together. At one end of the scale there are those who are incapable of
giving, frozen hard, as it were, against love: at the other are those who
in a splendid profusion of generosity pour out their gifts without taking
count of them: and the whole world lies between. From the pebble sensible
only to mechanical attraction, to the flower that scents the air, one
profound idea holds good, one great song rises, all mortal things cry
in unison, and the burden of their united voices is, love. Every moving
thing tends to entwine itself about something else, to unite inextricably
with it; all life tends to pour itself into another, to surrender itself,
and thereby it has a second birth, and all individual vibrations coalesce
into one grand note. And, above this symphony of material things, the
heart of man outpours itself in similar strains in the spiritual spheres
of true life which stretch up to God. The love of man, to adopt the
phrase in the _Imitation_, is a cry flung out towards God.
Love, then, is the ruling principle of the world, a noble, superb,
necessary thing; extending its broad wings it easily dominates the
littlenesses and conventions of life, responds to all needs, whether of
the individual soul or of society, sets frail hearts athrob with life.
But it is obvious, too, what a strife it is sure to excite, by its double
nature, between spirit and matter—a strife wonderful and delightful and
fierce.
Women are so constituted as to understand this sharp antagonism between
material love and spiritual love—women, who, at a certain crisis of
life, feel so strongly the contrast between the cruelties and ironies
of material things and the refinements of the heart. They drag about a
body often feeble, suffering, wretched, a misshapen, bleeding, shamefast
body, a pain-stricken body, born for love and worship, but subdued to
the surgeon. There comes a time when they would fain forget the animal
and wash it of its impurities if possible; their soul has become more
intensely spiritual. If they shudder at the recollection of certain
physical necessities, through that very fact the secret of happiness
appears to them simpler, more luminous, less clogged with matter;
branded by life, as certain mystics bore the brands of divine love, with
sides pierced and limbs explored and broken by the hands of men, they
are athirst for love, enthusiasm and worship, they understand that no
intellectual hair-splitting, no doctrinal analysis, is worth a snatch of
love. They know the sweetness of things. I will go farther: they know the
extraordinary influence of moral forces on physical health; the body,
like society at large, needs to be reinvigorated by soul and heart.
The truth strikes upon them vividly by a sort of intuition. But it is far
from being the case that all women are able to profit by it, because they
have to reckon with a thousand practical obstacles: they require great
liberty of mind and a large share of energy if they are to avoid being
restrained by a host of more or less respectable prejudices, conventions,
and usages. After all, timidity, indifference and frivolity are very
natural things.
Particularly in France, women needed genuine courage to assert their
resolution to act and take part in social work, in the midst of a society
essentially constituted to prevent them from giving effective expression
to their ideas—a society that was strenuous, Philistine, utterly strange
to philosophy and imaginative thinking, hidebound to traditions of very
rudimentary common-sense and a proud simplicity, composed of families
desirous of living in their own fashion under the direction of their
head, with no grand notion of forming parts of one stupendous whole. The
king was the head of the principal family; on this account, men showed
the most artless veneration for his person, but so long as the army was
duly organised and the frontiers properly defended at the least possible
expense, they troubled themselves very little about their sovereign’s
existence. So the despotic power of the husband was not merely domestic,
but political: the man was lord of the lands and the village as he was
of his wife, and he administered the whole without stirring up many
ideas, in intimate communion with his oxen and his oaks. Again and
again we find in portraits the rubicund faces of these honest-eyed
country squires. There was nothing extraordinary or gigantic about such
a man; he was a man of iron, that was all; and beside this substantial
creature vegetated, half-stifled, that fine and precious flower his wife,
sometimes a frail delicate thing with liquid eyes charmingly veiled, all
compact of concentrated passion, placid tenderness, and impressionability.
On the other hand, in strange contrast with this individualistic society
which lived in isolation as a matter of principle, there then flourished
at court, in the cities, and in certain great châteaux an extremely
active society, that of the salons. Effervescent, noisy like fresh
arrivals, ceremonious, gilded, of a refined and factitious elegance,
it represented what many writers called the “theatre of the world”:
marvellous stage scenery, which underwent remarkable transformations
under the shifting play of the side-lights, forming a background against
which the players strutted through their parts. Who were these actors?
Whence came they, whither were they going? These were questions about
which often enough there was little information and less concern;
sometimes it was thought best to ignore them altogether, for, thank
heaven! it was not to grow mouldy in the depths of the country that a
man intrigued, nor was assassination a means towards opening a grocer’s
shop. Occasionally, and usually when the curtain fell on a financial
act, someone disappeared, but without tragic accompaniments, and then
(except Semblançay,[126] who was hanged) he reappeared and went on with
the pantomime. There was nothing but praise for the noble use Admiral
de Graville made of his princely fortune, which was the object of some
discussion. Du Plessis so cleverly extricated himself from the toils of
justice that he could bequeath to us the admirable Cardinal Richelieu.
The Bohiers, Briçonnets, Robertets, Duprats,[127] and many another,
small or great, erected in all security their splendid châteaux, triumphs
of art, but a sort of affront to the old machicolations crumbling in cold
neglect under the moss. In those days Gold was king.
All this splendour and grace, this brilliant life, which seemed bound
to make everything around dim by comparison, nevertheless by no means
dazzled the common herd, but at first aroused a feeling of repulsion,
if not of jealousy. Outcries arose. Wealth was apparently losing its
character of a kindly and patriarchal simplicity, to bring into greater
prominence the figures of proud and self-important men who believed their
wealth would purchase everything—virtue, wit, honour, as easily as a
rare picture. A poor man accordingly was set down as a “soulless body”;
the virtuous man was one who lived in a palace, while the man who gave a
dinner-party was a master-mind.
To tyranny of this sort there was added the individual or social
misfortunes of a society naturally unstable and continually recruiting
itself by means of speculation. Thence arose outcries: “You make so many
poor folk cry alack! alack! that we long to see you fall headlong in the
dust!”[128]
Gold and pleasure were the deities to whom we owe the charming eighteenth
century. But they lead to revolutions. This fact came out clearly, too
clearly in fact, in Italy, and compelled men to endeavour to restrain
these two great world forces within wholesome limits. In the fifteenth
century Christian socialism reared its head high at Florence and Rome,
and under stress of its menaces a science of philosophy came to birth.
In presence of this social peril, certain men, compelled to issue
from their egotism, pointed out the road for timid women to follow
to avoid vengeful reprisals. Men of affairs, bankers, notaries and
others banded themselves together with the firm resolution of forgoing
business, interests, ambitions, even their for the most part despotic
hopes in state intervention, of seeking to practise self-devotion, and
of borrowing, if necessary, something of the idealism of philosophers
and artists, so that they might give a practical sanction to their high
station by working to raise others. The Florentine people swallowed
the bait; at once ardent and refined, they admirably blended practical
reasoning with ideal aspirations. And so the first step was taken.
However, it was more particularly at Rome that this idea, still
rudimentary and ill-defined, of purifying life and pursuing social
happiness by means of the tender charm of the Beautiful made progress.
It found there a well-prepared soil. Intellectual culture and elegance
of speech did not represent at Rome, as they did elsewhere, a mere
ornamentation, they were the very substance of the state. Money was
intellectualised as regards its origin and its end, and nowhere had men
a better conception of an oligarchical society, a republic regulated by
absolute power. The heads of the church formed a unique world of their
own, as little tainted by the military or frivolous character with
which certain aristocracies were reproached as by the taste for coarse
pleasures natural to some self-made men. They showed indeed a living
example of a true aristocracy, in the exact signification of the word,
that is to say, a body of men of varied degrees of rank, raised high
above the common run of men by some eminent gift—some by high political
position or distinguished birth, others by a large fortune, others by
great accomplishments, renowned virtue, profound learning, striking
talents. They abhorred cliques and their pettinesses; to greatness
of position should correspond greatness of ideas. And this splendid
aristocracy, thus composed of the choice flower of society, delighted
in tracing its descent from remote ancestors. It set no store either on
high ancestry (though some were of brilliant descent), or on a display
of wealth (though some had enormous fortunes); it ventured to connect
itself with all the most illustrious and conspicuous names in the past
history of the human race from the time of the Greeks and Romans: Plato,
Socrates, Archimedes, and Cicero were its ancestors. And thus, with a
strange persistence, it constantly tended to lift into its own ranks by
its example, its doctrines and its easy accessibility all men who felt
within themselves a spark of genius or talent, or even ambition merely.
This atmosphere was very favourable to the development of the theory
of social aesthetics of which Castiglione has etched the principal
features. “Luxury must be opposed, even if we have recourse to
law; social life must be given a moral and governmental goal; to
keep the appetites under, the laws must find effectual support in
custom. The power of a single ruler fosters corruption; but it has
this advantage—that wisdom, goodness and justice are more easily
found in a single individual supported by strong traditions than in
a fortuitous assemblage of obscure citizens.” What is wanted is to
institute a kingship in the world for which justice and beauty are the
qualifications, and which is thus more real and of a diviner right than
any other. Mammon, that is, the love of gold, the love of power and
pleasure, can only reign in a world of night, when we have eyes but
cannot see, when we have lips from which no human cry issues, when we
are dead to enthusiasm, and when our whole life consists in eating and
drinking.
In France the socialist danger, presenting itself in a much less acute
form, could not produce the same effects. The people who were to show
their teeth fifty years later were as yet silent, and there was no
anxiety about the future except among the cultivated classes. Moneyed
people bore themselves with becoming modesty, and remained on the best
of terms with the most notable representatives of the old nobility. But
the nobility, being no longer feudal, was no longer of much account,
and a moral crisis of exceeding gravity took place in the ranks of this
aristocracy based wholly on birth and fortune. Sheer vanity took the
place of pride; the “smoke”[129] of titles became a more powerful motive
than the love of glory.
The great financiers almost all became barons, in order to get above
finance; the holders of fiefs became barons, counts and marquises.
Ordinary mortals came to hold fiefs; the most insignificant dovecot
was transformed into a château. Society moved on a step, and everybody
was satisfied. It was quite a steeplechase in the Italian style.
Pontanus,[130] for all his malicious ridicule of it, had himself
vainly solicited the title of baron. The good duke of Urbino, a great
philosopher whose elevation was of very recent date, employed the
assassin’s knife to put out of the way a girl of the lesser nobility whom
his eldest son loved and wished to marry, and Louise of Savoy warmly
approved of this magnificent implacability.[131]
Pedigrees assumed wonderful proportions. Only those who had the moral
simplicity of Margaret of Austria were content with the ancient
kings of Germany for ancestors; every Scottish archer, no matter how
insignificant, claimed descent from the ancient kings of Scotland. Louise
of Savoy made a beginning by modestly connecting the French house with
the most ancient of royal dynasties, that of Babylon.
Some went even farther. They dived into the remote and shadowy depths
of history, the ages of stone and iron, when some wild girl became
their ancestress through a chance meeting with a savage in a wood, and
when five minutes’ rain instead of sunlight would have been enough to
wash a whole race of men from the page of immortality. Anne of Brittany
was descended from one of the giants sprung direct from mother Earth.
Rabelais with great gravity presents his hero to us in his exact style as
son of one of the original sons of Earth: “Would to God,” he adds, “that
everyone was as well acquainted with his pedigree from the time of the
Flood!”
But in reality, under cover of these novel and pedantic vanities, money,
with its brutality and vulgarity and appeal to vulgar minds, led the
dance and dragged the pick of the nation pellmell after it. The Balsac of
the time, Robert de Balsac, fills a good many pages with examples of the
crowd of worldlings who, as he expresses it, hurried in unbridled, almost
frantic haste on the road to beggary.[132] There are voluptuaries,
debauchees, spendthrifts, men gorged with gold, yet athirst for more,
tumultuously dashing on and upwards in frightful torment and agitation
towards a will o’ the wisp; one after another they fall headlong into
the gulf, while the foreground is filled with the eternal procession
moving on with slow pace and clockwork regularity. Alongside of this mad
insolent triumph of gold fierce hatreds develop, and men begin to speak
under their breath of the horrible triumph of wretchedness approaching,
and can foretell the hour when materialism from below will make its awful
response to materialism from above.
Women ought to have remedied this state of things. They ought to have
prevented men from becoming besotted and ruining themselves. Anne of
France dared not suggest to all these idle nobles that they might occupy
themselves with intellectual things, but she was anxious at least to
brace them up by a life of physical endurance. Without military courage,
she declares, the nobility resembles “a withered tree,” without valour
“it is nothing worth.”
What she was losing hope of, a fraction of the clergy set themselves
to win. There was, among the mass of cassocked peasants and rochetted
aristocrats, a small group of cultivated men drawing its inspiration from
the Cardinal of Amboise,[133] less audacious than Rome, less retrograde
than Germany. These recognised the traditional merits of military glory,
birth, and money, but would have liked to reconcile them with the newer
virtues, blend them together into one radiance, homogeneous like the
sunbeam, which is composed of colours so various; they would have liked
to see all these glories combining, as at Rome, into one rainbow-like
effulgence. A monk of Cluny, Clichtoue, begs, beseeches well-born young
men to shun the enervating paths of infatuation, idleness and vice. He
has endless examples showing the possibility of alliance between literary
tastes[134] and the military life; he reveres the principles of rank
so highly as to discern them in application everywhere, even among the
metals; but he longs ardently to bind into one sheaf all the vital
forces of society; he is a philosopher, one may even say a sort of John
the Baptist. He proclaims Plato; he is more scriptural than Luther, and
has as much antique culture as any Roman prelate;[135] to him the future
seems to outline itself clearly. “After virtue,” he says, “a noble can
have no comelier ornament than letters. Philosophy is not the recipient,
but the source of nobility.” He adjures distinguished men to pay real
attention to the social obligations incumbent on them, under penalty of
losing their rank. He does not disavow the natural pleasure a man takes
in the thought that he has had ancestors and will have descendants, but
to him this does not seem a sufficient though an honourable aim in life.
If no means are found of uniting the two nobilities, that of the body and
that of the mind, no doubt (in his opinion) the nobility of the mind will
get the upper hand; Solomon, who is not generally considered a modern or
even a socialist, had already said so long ago: “I myself also am mortal,
like to other men, and am sprung from the terrestrial lineage of the
first man. And in the womb of a mother was I moulded into flesh. And I
also, when I was born, drew in the common air and fell upon the kindred
earth, uttering, like all men, for my first voice the self-same wail: in
swaddling clothes was I nursed, and with watchful cares. Who among the
kings had any other beginning? All men have one entrance into life, and a
like departure.”
Clichtoue, however, as well as his friends the Lamennais and
Montalemberts of the period, confined himself to counsels and
prognostics, which indeed the future was in great part to justify; he had
not yet discovered the exact formula. He had it at the tip of his tongue,
but could not give it utterance; it seemed as though in France the words
‘beauty’ and ‘love’ were no words for a man or a churchman. These noble
and lofty words were to come from a higher sphere, and from women’s lips.
It was Margaret of France who at last uttered them, and they were echoed
around her.
Here we find the remedy so ardently sought for against materialism, as
Jean Bouchet explains it on Margaret’s behalf: “To purify the world, to
eliminate its coarser elements; to give wealth only the lowest place as a
source of social distinction, and even then only on condition that the
plutocrat lives nobly, that is to say, unselfishly, and makes noble deeds
his constant study.” True nobility is not a cockade, a label, a name, but
a moral reality; “it springs from the soul, and not from wealth.” Noble
and lofty spirits are recognised precisely by their innate simplicity;
they leave the gildings, the pompous blazonments, to “the sons of
swineherds, sempsters, stockingers, and other mechanical folk. But
those who are illustrious by long descent reveal their nobility beyond
possibility of mistake, for they have in them something, I know not
what, of naïve goodwill that manifestly separates them from the arrogant
assumptions of false nobles.” Spirited, showy, a genuine blue-blood,
restive under marital authority, but quivering to her inmost fibres at
the slightest appeal of a refined sentiment, Margaret of France remained
obstinately faithful to these principles, finding in them the pole-star
that guided her steps throughout life. The words we last quoted were
uttered in circumstances which give them a special force, namely, in the
funeral oration of Scaevola de Sainte-Marthe, who thought he could cast
upon the princess’s tomb no sweeter flowers, none more likely to blossom
eternally. Margaret herself never lost an opportunity of emphasising with
all her force the terrible fear she had of the power of money.
Aimer l’argent,
Sinon pour s’en aider, c’est servir les idoles![136]
In regard to those who deal with humanity like brokers, and believe that
happiness is purchasable, she gives vent to passionate apostrophes worthy
of the most ardent Christian socialists:
Ilz ont plaisirs tant qu’ils en veulent prendre,
Ilz ont honneurs s’ilz y veulent prétendre,
Ilz ont des biens plus qu’il ne leur en fault.[137]
And this was precisely what men were aiming at. The military framework of
society was broken; to replace it by a financial framework would have
been considered almost criminal; and that was where the great danger lay.
To employ a comparison approved by Francis I., two cars are running the
world’s course side by side; a choice must be made between them. One is
the car of Plutus, filled with gold, lechery, vice; the other is the car
of Honour and Love, thronged about by all the virtues.[138] The choice is
clear: for its own happiness, for its own glory, the world must reject
the worship of money, trample on the power of money, and proclaim the
power of virtuous love.
Thus, little by little, the formula sought for emerges into view. A
wonderful light is thrown on the problem when it is admitted that to
be happy it is necessary to rise above material things, and establish
society upon a philosophy of love. Life and beauty, they are the true
riches! The feeblest of men, the most hopeless invalids, the vilest
outcasts, woman with her feeble body and ardent soul, are richer than a
nugget of gold, more eternal than the Alps, greater than the sea and the
vast realm of nature, for this very reason that they have in them life,
the true life, that is, consciousness of life, confidence in life, and
love of life.
And the same idea that happiness must be sought through true life, led
men to recognise the necessity of considering the ‘hygiene’ of this
life. Medicine, care and pity had been up to that time only for the ills
of the body, for the gaping, gory wounds that came under the eye; the
wounds of heart and spirit had been forgotten. To render life sumptuous
and brilliant, to fritter it away in a sort of giddy excitement or
intoxication, was the utmost of men’s achievement. The heart cannot be
bought; there is no specific for healing its wounds; they must heal
themselves.
The art will consist then, in realising as far as may be the plenitude of
life; in other words, in extracting from Christianity, which is Hope and
Charity, an aesthetic philosophy. “I am the God of the living,” said the
Master. If we combine the sayings on life scattered through the gospels
we obtain a true code of aestheticism, while the sayings on love form
the warp and woof of the doctrine. On the morrow of the Resurrection,
when the rude fishers chosen to disseminate the sacred tidings are in
utter ignorance of the event, the Master shows Himself first of all
to Love; He appears at the gates of a mysterious garden by which Mary
Magdalene is about to pass—Mary, a woman pardoned, glorified, because she
loved much, because she sinned through superabundant kindliness.
This doctrine of love had not prospered in the world, where it found
briers too deeply rooted, thorns too cruel; it had become a supernatural
and sacred thing, so sublime that it fled the world and took refuge in
the cloister, like a sickly plant in a hothouse, leaving a free field
for vice. Tenderness seemed to come only from feebleness; every form of
art seemed immoral, all love a degenerate and ill-balanced thing, and no
one realised the need goodness has of intelligence. The pettinesses of
feminine religiosity, encouraged, unhappily, by a section of the clergy,
tended to make divine love itself ineffectual and almost ridiculous. Yet
the author of the _Imitation_ has defined love as the true source of
activity:
“Nothing is there in Heaven or earth sweeter than love, nothing stronger,
broader, higher, fuller, better, or more winsome, for love is of God,
nor can it rest but in Him, above the world created. The lover runneth
and flieth, and is alive with joy; he is free, and nothing restraineth
him; he giveth all for all, hath all in all, because he resteth above all
things in the one sovereign good whence all other goodnesses proceed and
flow. He looketh not to gifts, but raiseth himself above all to look only
to the giver. Love often knoweth no limit, but its fervour carrieth it
far above measure. Love feeleth no weight, making light of toil, would
do more than it is able, pleadeth no impossibility, because it thinketh
it may and can do all. Wherefore it is strong for anything, and where
he that loveth not doth faint and fail, love doeth and achieveth many
things.”[139]
Why then had not this beautiful religion, this beautiful philosophy
become the religion and philosophy of the world? Why had they not sent
their streams of activity flowing in ever-widening channels? Men wished
to solve this problem, and restore to the world the philosophy it had
so misunderstood—to interpret love as it should be interpreted, through
impressions and sensibility, and not through the intellect. Hence
Castiglione’s saying, “God is only seen through women.”
This saying, it is clear, does not apply to all women; it has reference
to those who are worthy to exercise an active influence.
Natural obstacles oppose themselves to this mission of philosophically
raising the world to nobler ideas by the social religion of beauty. The
French are a matter-of-fact, practical, sceptical people; between the
peasant and his cattle, the lord and the peasant, there exists a solid
and after all a pleasant relationship. Further, the French are specially
hostile to ideas of an intellectual hierarchy, they lack sensibility,
the beautiful displeases and shocks them, and when a revolution gives
them what they call a moment’s freedom, they amuse themselves by defacing
as many statues as possible, destroying their cathedrals, burning their
historical monuments with all the enthusiasm of hate a personal grievance
can inspire. Likewise, in regard to love, modesty, the ideal, and all
refined and aesthetic sentiments, we experience a certain pleasure in
scouting them; when we have won any sort of diploma, that is the use we
make of it.
And yet, do what we may, lofty things alone can elevate us: on the
mountain-top we breathe a different air from that in the valley.
We must raise on heights above us eminent women who will crucify
themselves, if need be, to draw soil-stained men to them, according to
Christ’s words, “I will draw all things unto me”—women endowed with all
that glorifies—money (to scorn money is the luxury of the rich); a noble
blood clarified on stricken fields, or through intellectual wrestlings,
a spirit original and pure. Christ was at once the son of kings and the
Son of God! This is the consecration of happiness through a philosophy of
emotion and sentiment. Plato said that what was needed for the happiness
of humanity, was “philosophers who rule, or kings who philosophise.”
Do not believe it! What is wanted is kings who govern, and women who
philosophise. Men will always imagine that liberty and equality are
established by act of Parliament; philosophy is to them only a means of
livelihood. Cremonini, a famous professor, but a wit, said when he took
leave at the close of his lectures: “All that I have taught you is true
according to Aristotle, but not in an absolute sense: you might as well
believe St. Roch or St. Anthony.” Nifo[140] contradicted himself with
charming serenity, though he allowed no one else to contradict him. In
truth, how were these excellent professors of philosophy to know that,
three and a half centuries later, a Mabilleau, a Fiorentino, or a Ferri
would doggedly set themselves to unearth their unpublished lucubrations
from the dust of libraries, and throw on them the searchlight of
criticism?
Men had reached that stage of lassitude and of wisdom when one
understands perfectly how vain, how unworthy of occupying a thoughtful
man, are the vagaries of logic-chopping. There are only two vital forces:
ambition and love. Anne of France reckons four: beauty, youth, wealth,
and ambition; but these four terms are reducible to the former two. A
doctrine of love, therefore, was necessary, and it was discovered in
Plato.
Thus there were two masters in opposition, Plato and Machiavelli.
Plato is as much a poet as a philosopher, as worthy of admiration for
his impressions and intuitions as for his ideas. He believes in beauty.
It had been said that beauty was of no account, that it had no place in
the gospels, that form signified nothing except perhaps by way of symbol,
that truth was metaphysical. That error had to be dismissed. Beauty has
a real existence, and plays a supreme part in this world. God has not
disowned it, Scripture reveals Him as bestowing life bountifully, and as
taking pleasure in man as His own image. Plato in effect develops this
same theory; what is more, he sings the praises of aestheticism in one
of the finest languages ever lisped by human tongue. It was he then who
furnished the desired formula. With him, men thought only of loving their
fellows, of expelling evil passions by means of pure love. A sweet breath
of spring fanned men’s hearts; it was philosophical and Christian. Did
Luther conceive a reform as trenchant, as vital as that? Men went back to
that blessed time when, without employing the quiddities of the Sorbonne
and of German science, Heaven spoke the simple words to us: “Love one
another.” They believed they had found the secret of rejuvenescence,
of re-birth, and there were men so intoxicated that they went so far
as to ask themselves whether Charity countenanced trade or taxes. The
whole idea is summed up in a single line: power results in barbarism,
civilisation is the product of beauty.
This formula suits both strong and weak, everyone, indeed; it belongs
neither to men nor to women, hails neither from north nor from south. The
northern peoples, however, looking at Plato with a purely philosophical
and technical eye, failed to discover it; at Venice, the headquarters
of perfect editions of Plato, and at Paris, where he was acclaimed as a
prophet, an ancestor of Christianity, where Florentine commentaries on
him poured fast from the press, and where even a neglected commentary
of Ficino[141] was published, no one dreamed of seeking the recipe for
happiness in Plato’s philosophy. So greatly was he distrusted that the
Italian Vicomercati, appointed in 1542 to the professorship of philosophy
at the College of France, thought it his duty by way of returning thanks
to immolate Socrates in his inaugural lecture.
It was the Florentines, with their keen appreciation of the good things
of life, who discovered the artistic side of the platonic life. Women did
not count for nothing in their first deduction, which consisted in so
linking the objects of nature to the human personality that they should
form thenceforth nothing but one long procession of the affections. At
Florence this new religion was observed with tender and pleasing rites.
On the anniversary of Plato’s death, the master’s bust was crowned with
laurel by invited guests, and then at a magnificent banquet spread
under the pleasant shade, _laudes_ and _canzoni_ were sung in honour of
the new spirit. Almost all were poets, and Lorenzo de’ Medici chiefest
among them. They maintained a strict conformity with Christian ideas.
The young Giovanni de’ Medici, the future Leo X., who was brought up
among them, received at the age of seven valuable benefices with the
ecclesiastical tonsure, and at thirteen was given the cardinal’s hat. All
the leaders of the movement, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola,[142] Politian,
were honoured with pontifical patronage. Rome also was the centre of a
similar movement; there the academy of Pomponius Laetus[143] resuscitated
the grand days of the republic; there men breathed as at Florence an
intellectual air, light, keen and eminently free. To the _Facetiae_ of
Poggio, babbled out in a room at the Vatican before a select circle of
jovial monsignors, corresponded the joyous atrocities of Panormita, the
boon companion of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Everyone smiled, everyone
was happy: the very _bezants_ or golden pieces, the glory of the Medici
escutcheon, sparkled in the sun like flashes of their wit.
The luscious warmth of the air, shady groves, birds, gardens, statues,
antique marbles, thus played an indispensable part in the platonic
philosophy. A banquet in honour of the nine Muses served us as a map of
this new world; Marzilio Ficino, chosen by lot, chanted to the glory of
the divine character of love a superb song whose echoes were long to
resound.
Learned critics have sometimes reproached Ficino with not sticking close
enough to the text of the master, and with permitting himself outbursts
of virtuosity tinctured (so they say) with Alexandrinism. Likely enough;
Ficino was Ficino, a man, independent, enthusiastic, no fanatic; he
steered for happiness, and whatever his admiration for Socrates, he
did not imagine that that great man had necessarily said the last word
about everything, any more than he believed men eternally committed to
Corinthian capitals. His dream was of a human dwelling-house, noble,
comfortable, habitable for us all, a living shelter for life! While
pushing out glorious reconnaissances along the roads to heaven, Plato had
clearly left men’s minds undecided on some points of great importance to
their happiness, and it seemed wise to supply his deficiency by accepting
with closed eyes the explanations furnished by Christianity.
A thousand voices exclaim, like Montaigne and Charron, that the
immortality of the soul cannot be proved by sheer force of reasoning.
In any case, how long we have to wait! cries Margaret of France. For
how many centuries have some who have fallen asleep looked for their
awakening!
The Middle Ages replied to this question with their own terrible logic.
They set us on the edge of the abyss, and there told us that in this
world there is no happiness, but merely consolations; they linked us with
a supreme life lying beyond us, like those hard, emaciated, immovable
statues incorporate with the stone of cathedrals and themselves of the
same stone. We live, they told us, with another life than our own, and
love with another love; if we lose one dear to us we may cast flowers on
the vacant chair or the needless cradle, altars of true life! Platonism
prefers to take us for what we are. Not supposing that Providence sets
man upon the earth to struggle against its own blessings, the platonists
believed that in making religion more lovable they would make the world
less pagan, and that in giving it a philosophical cast they would make
it acceptable to unbelievers. Love seemed to them to be a reservoir of
life, like those noble springs which leap down in some shady nook of a
park, and flow on through a network of arteries more or less conspicuous,
to give life even to the desert. Soon we shall no longer be; the hours
of our life are sacred: what is the good of ruffling them with so many
disquietudes? It is a law of our life to yearn for Paradise, and there is
nothing to hinder us desiring it in this present world.
The study of Plato, then, was entered upon freely, with the addition
of anything that could throw light upon the doctrines which that great
man had founded—the Bible, for instance, which in the Roman world men
prided themselves on consulting directly; then Arabic and even Mussulman
philosophy, with which it was fashionable to claim acquaintance. And it
was well understood that a quest pursued with so subtle a magnificence,
in scorn of realities and brutal sensualism, demanded a keen and
eminently free intelligence, a soul at leisure, and a great loathing
of the flesh; otherwise all hope of falling under the exquisite
fascinations of love at once terrestrial and quasi-divine must be
abandoned. That explains why from the outset this philosophy addressed
itself to women and to the salons. Plato began to be talked about as we
in our day have heard Schopenhauer and other eminent thinkers talked
about by persons who have been at little pains to read them. It was known
that Plato harped on the necessity of love, that his smile was less
forbidding than that of S. Francis of Assisi, and that his method was
dialogue, so naturally dialogues and conversations became the methods
of the new platonists. From these tender colloquies the vulgar were
excluded; they could make nothing of them; one could not expect common
folk to apprehend the delicate devices by which love is etherealised and
rendered impalpable; from these they would only have got a theme for
gross perversions. Those who had the gift of knowledge and understanding
ascended the Acropolis like M. Renan, to chant their canticles in a
little temple of their own, whose dimensions seemed to them sufficient;
the aristocratic mystery replaced the old priestly mystery; so Cataneo
whispered, as it were under his breath, his book on love addressed only
to the priests and temple choristers. Bembo took great care not to
name the interlocutors male and female of the _Asolani_, “so as not to
scandalise the populace”; all were agreed in religiously respecting the
ignorance of the people, as to-day we respect the ignorance of young
girls. And for the same reason, again, they made too prodigal a use of
that strange mythological jargon which appears to us in these days so
entirely pathetic. Mythology has its aesthetic advantages; it is an
incarnation of the passions; but that would not suffice to explain its
sickening vogue in a society full of taste, scepticism and levity, if
it had not presented the one special advantage of furnishing a sort of
technical slang by which the initiated recognised one another, and which
sifted out the vulgar. The princes of wit felt so strongly the need of
such distinctions that before adopting this garb for their works they
began by muffling their own identity in an antique livery: a Greek or
Latin name served them as a uniform,[144] as when San Severino called
himself Pomponius Laetus, the old aristocratic pride yielding before
this new-fangled vanity. Artistic glory donned the conventional garb; no
one had the preposterous notion of lamenting in Raphael the exquisite
interpreter of Madonnas; what was deplored was the rival of Nature, the
painter after the antique. “Raphael has resuscitated ancient Rome,”
exclaims Castiglione, “he has recalled to life and glory that Rome of
old, that corpse devoured by sword and fire and time.” That was the
language of the courts, the ladies and the princes of the church; they
had said all when they compared Raphael to the painters of the Augustan
age (with whose works we are not very well acquainted), and when they
remembered that the new Rome was only a degenerate if not a moribund Rome.
We dwell at some length on a state of mind of such peculiarity and
complexity as this, and from which contradictory deductions were
sometimes drawn, because we find in it the only possible explanation of
the movement about to arise in France. Platonism was an impression, an
essence of free-thought, purely aesthetic, Christian in principle though
sometimes pagan in its results, warranted platonic in label and origin
though somewhat eclectic in composition; a mystic incense in the worship
of Venus, a subtle aroma floating in the air both of churches and of
theatres; breathed in assemblies in the city; dominating the effluences
of Nature under the shadow of country villas; open a book, and one caught
a breath of it; even painting and music strove to interpret it fittingly;
at the dinners and dances and in the thousand avocations of fashionable
life it filled the air; it exhaled as it were an immortal savour of
orange blossoms; this was what they called a philosophy.
The platonist spirit, as Plato understood it, was often exactly the
opposite. The women and the poets whom Plato condemned,[145] the prelates
who were the heads of Christendom, were its propagators. They were not
greatly enamoured of Plato’s somewhat socialistic theories. They went
to Plato as we go to Nice, to obtain a little sunshine and escape the
incessant din of controversy. It is a profound saying of Plato that
“those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to
know, and not to have opinion only.” That is what men desired: they would
have run after illusions and even errors if only they made for happiness.
What is the good of pursuing mutabilities? The wise man clings to that
which tranquillises. Others may wear themselves out with anxiety and
restlessness, but he enjoys his life of placid ease; in the end they die
and he dies, and there is nothing to choose between them.
Before it could be turned to profitable account, platonism thus underwent
a long and difficult preparation to bring it into line with the tastes
of the day. The work was accomplished in Italy, whence the product was
sent to us in a finished state. Good Plato, with his rather old-fashioned
eyes, had seen beauty only in man; from one man he passed to the species,
then from the species to the soul, that is, to intellectual beauty, which
to him appeared the only true beauty. It was necessary to bring this
doctrine into line with the practical doctrine of the special attraction
exercised on man by the beauty of woman. Now Plato, besides giving
man the beauty and woman the love, attributed to love the secondary
character of a sensual and egoistic phenomenon in which no spiritual
element was discoverable save perhaps the instinct of immortality. Of
this very instinct, however, Plato had an imperfect appreciation, for the
immortality we might hope to gain by replacing our decayed bodies with
the fresh young lives of our offspring, if it serves the interests of the
human race, does not much serve those of the individual; at any rate,
Plato considered it at once vulgar—everyone or nearly everyone being able
to aspire to it—and incomplete, for transmission and conservation of life
are not the same thing, and only a person very barren of intellectual
resources could content himself with so modest a glimmer of immortality.
A man only survives through his thoughts. The last shreds of the thoughts
of Homer or Hesiod will live long, and will long cause temples to spring
from the earth; what child of flesh and blood is likely to bear his
father’s glory thus on through the ages?
The earliest interpreters of Plato, Ficino and Politian, had departed
with no little timidity from his teaching; the one eclectic and cautious,
the other adventurous, they went nevertheless not much beyond formulating
a general doctrine of love. Ficino exalted love as the supreme wisdom,
the creator and preserver _par excellence_; the link binding earthly
things together, and the earth itself with heaven; the inspirer of great
deeds and noble thoughts, a necessary element of life. He preached the
love of love itself: “The man who loves, loves love above all; love is
sufficient unto itself and finds its goal within itself; it is true and
good and pure.” But in order to bring himself into conformity with the
new spirit, Ficino admitted as derived from Plato (though as a matter of
fact it is not to be found in his works)[146] a capital distinction upon
which the platonism of the Renaissance was entirely to rest: there are
two loves, different in degree, the one heaven-born and fixing its gaze
upon heaven, the other born of Jupiter and seeking only to produce a form
like him.
Francesco Cataneo insisted strongly on this invaluable distinction.
Analysing man, he found in him a mind, the source of true spiritual love,
and a sort of intermediate force hard to define, a “soul or life” whence
sensual or, if the term be preferred, profane love has its being. Cataneo
moreover dealt hardly with profane love, representing it as bare-footed
to indicate its foolishness, lean for lack of nourishment, and winged,
for it is evanescent, dependent on physical beauty, on “worthless dross”;
and it was because the world knew no other love that the preaching of
a Reformation became necessary. As to women, Cataneo never ceased to
consider them as stones of stumbling; inheriting all the old prejudices
of the schoolmen, he saw in women nothing but imperfect men created for
the sole end of perpetuating the race, and man ever seemed to him the
perfect type.
But with what warmth, with what passion Bembo, the Roman prelate and
future cardinal, expounds the modern principles before the charming
coterie of Urbino, and, flinging away the swaddling bands of early days,
confesses himself frankly a feminist![147]
“The terrestrial beauty that excites love,” he says, “is an inflowing
(_influsso_) of divine beauty irradiating all creation. It rests like a
beam of light on regular, graceful and harmonious features; it beautifies
this countenance, shining in it, attracting all eyes to it, and through
them penetrating, stirring, delighting the soul and bringing desire to
birth therein. Love is thus really born of a ray of divine beauty, caught
through the medium of a woman’s face. Unhappily the senses interpose: a
man sees in the body itself the source of beauty and longs to enjoy it.
How deceived he is! It is not beauty that is thus enjoyed; an appetite
is appeased, and soon comes satiety, weariness and often aversion. These
deceptions and regrets abundantly prove what an error has been made, for
a man must needs have found joy and restfulness if he had sought the true
end, whereas on the contrary love gives rise to a thousand ills—griefs
and torments, vexation and sullen fits, despondency, catastrophes even;
the heart never attains the limit of its desires, or perhaps the man is
so sunk in sensual love, declines so far towards the level of the beasts,
as to become incapable of comprehending the supreme radiance. All these
experiences are dearly purchased. Knowledge how to love comes only in
ripe manhood: only the old indeed really have it, and their skill lies in
eluding the impulse of the senses, in fleeing from all that is vulgar. If
he can do no otherwise, a man must set his face steadfastly towards love
divine, taking reason for his guide.”
True love, then, is a disinterested love inspired in man by woman. And
therefore Bembo, who was the more knowing in these things because he
had loved deeply, was still young, and had not yet heard his own clear
call towards love divine, lifts up his voice in a passionate prayer: “O
love, most good, most beautiful, most wise, thou that comest from divine
goodness and wisdom, and returnest thither again, O thou cord binding us
poor terrestrial and mortal folk one to another, thou bendest the higher
virtues to dominate the lower! Thou dost unite the elements, thou dost
perpetuate the life that perisheth, thou makest imperfection perfect,
thou bringest discords into harmony, thou turnest foes into friends, thou
givest fruit to the earth, peace to the waves, and to heaven its light of
life! O father of true pleasures, of grace and peace, of lowliness and
goodwill, O enemy of wildness and pride and slothfulness, thou art the
alpha and omega of all good!
“Thou dost reveal thyself in terrestrial beauty! Hear our prayers,
lighten our darkness, guide us through the mazes of this world, rectify
the falseness of our senses. Humbly we beg of thee balmy breath from the
spiritual world, a touch of celestial harmony, an inexhaustible fount
of true contentment! Purge our eyes of ignorance, and make us to see in
its perfection the beauty of on high! Love is communion with the divine
beauty, the banquet of the angels, immortal ambrosia!”
It is now time to answer an objection which the reader has no doubt
formulated long ago, and which Bembo very clearly perceived.
Assuredly it is woman’s mission among us to represent beauty, and
consequently love, and love is the inspiration of noble thoughts and
great actions. But these are such old truths that to find them hardly
needed so much intellectual and poetic effort, or the harking back to
Plato.
The learned book _On the Nature of Love_, in which Equicola essays
simply an enumeration of the different species of love known since the
thirteenth century, resembles a collection of butterflies. Every colour
is there, brilliant or dull; the sentimental view is there represented
in almost infinite shades, from the magnificent love of Boucicaut, who
served all women for the love of one, the Holy Virgin, to the art of
loving for love’s sake, always fashionable in the salons, and sedulously
cultivated as an excellent prescription for innocuous emotions and a
cheap renown. Men well knew how to love, to be sure!
But love is rarely reciprocal; as someone has said, one loves and the
other takes the kisses. So far, it was the woman who was recognised as
the beauty, and consequently as the loved one, and who took the kisses.
The novelty of Plato’s system was to transfer the beauty to men, which
ran counter to all accepted notions. To Bembo this theory seemed
intolerable. That women are capable of loving he firmly believed and
rejoiced to believe. But to give up loving women appeared to him too
cruel. He would much rather give platonism the go-by and acknowledge the
reciprocity of beauty and love. In short, he fell back on Petrarchism.
Michelangelo proclaimed the true modern platonism with extraordinary
ardour in professing a love at once virile and pure. “I have often heard
him reason and discourse on love,” writes Condivi, “and I learnt from
persons present that he spoke of it no otherwise than may be read in
Plato. I do not know what Plato says, but I know well, having long had
intimate intercourse with Michelangelo, that I never heard issue from his
mouth aught but the most becoming words, apt to repress the lawless and
unbridled desires that might spring up in the hearts of young men.”
Michelangelo said more than once that God is seen in terrestrial beauty;
love is only a hymn to the Creator; “for if every one of our affections
is displeasing to heaven, to what end would God have created the world?”
A great love makes only for the highest morality, it provides man with
wings for a sublime flight:[148]
Thy wondrous beauty, image of the grace
That fills all heaven with glory, to us shown
By the Eternal Artist’s hand alone,
When time and age have worn it from thy face,
Nor age nor time can from my heart displace,
But ever deeplier graven shall it be;
For in my thought that beauty I shall see
Which Time’s cold finger never can erase.
If the soul were not created in the image of God it would seek after
nothing but external beauty; but it does in truth penetrate beyond
this deceptive outer form, to fix itself on the essential, to rise
until it attains the ideal or universal form: _Transcende nella forma
universale_.[149] Thus beauty elevates and quickens us into the world of
spirits and the elect. Many of Michelangelo’s verses convey the same idea
under different forms:
The fount that feeds my love is not my heart,
For though I love thee, yet my love withal
Is not to heart of flesh and blood in thrall,
But ever yearneth toward a goal apart,
Where no base mortal passion dare intrude,
Nor any guilty thought nor impulse rude.
A love without heart! Here indeed is the formula of the new
platonism![150]
Unfortunately, Michelangelo is a striking and titanic exception. He can
scarcely be considered the head of a school: and platonism became for
the most part nothing more than a fashionable science, the antidote to
marriage; an intellectual union between a hard-headed, lusty-armed man
and a woman all tenderness and wisdom; the formula of the government
of man by woman. Its origin and its end remained equally philosophic;
in short, it was a sentimental sociology. If it had been a question
of philosophy, no one could better have represented Plato than
Savonarola.[151] But Savonarola did not represent the intellect of
society; behind him men thought they caught a whiff of all the wretched
tatterdemalions in revolt at Rome against the Academy of Laetus, at
Florence against the Medici. On the other hand, Tullia d’Aragona, a
courtesan, exercised a platonic influence through her excellent book _On
the Infinity of Perfect Love_. Others unceremoniously dismissed Socrates
and Plato as liars and knaves, and yet passed for good platonists since
they extolled the religion of beauty, and woman as essentially its
priestess; and since they saw in love the chain binding earth to heaven,
and the bulwark against socialism. In short, platonism and feminism are
one and the same. It is quite possible to believe implicitly in the
dogma of love without splitting love in two and pinning ourselves on an
impossible dilemma—matter without spirit or spirit without matter. This
latitude of appreciation is not to be called materialism, but merely the
need of a material perception in order to arrive at the idea of beauty.
This explains why the platonist spirit was so coldly received in France.
Platonism was the art of rendering virtue pleasant and contagious; but in
France it was the conviction that virtue needed to defend itself like the
fretful porpentine.[152]
No one troubled about spiritualising love; the inferior clergy, parish
parsons, applying in every matter a rough-and-ready system of ethics,
drew no distinction between sentiment and sensation, but proscribed
everything. They summed up the religious life in a multitude of
observances all having for result the subjection of women—a contracted
morality which gave rise to startling inconsequences. It was pretended
that the mere sight of a lady fidgeting about on her balcony was enough
to tell you she was a Frenchwoman.[153]
Anne of France forbade lovemaking between fiancés, the best, most
innocent, most legitimate in the world, just as strictly as the grossest
intrigue; but Louise of Savoy was as little shocked at the one as the
other.
There was bitter hostility between the two camps.
Madame de Taillebourg remorselessly turned her back on her nieces, Louise
of Savoy and Margaret of France, as being tainted with the new spirit.
Queen Anne personally led the crusade in favour of the old ideas; Antony
du Four, her almoner, published semi-officially a collection of the lives
of ninety-one pious women, as a counterblast to the Italian collections;
and he implored ladies not to succumb to the new contagion, not to run
out of their salutary groove, for, he said, France had never produced
“more wise and good women than at present,” beginning with Queen Anne, “a
bottomless well of virtue.” “Under the mask of science and philosophy”
all these “prating and scribbling fellows” who wished to give women a
great part to play were only seeking, declared Du Four, to sap their
modesty and wreck their good name.
In these criticisms there was certainly a modicum of truth. But they went
too far in anathemising the good and the evil without distinction.
France, like Italy, had its “primitive” women—philosophers, apostles of
the philosophy of love; but their numbers and above all their influence,
owing to the opposition we have just indicated, were very small. They
were women of admirable endowments and sterling qualities, highly
educated, afire with energy of that somewhat melancholy cast necessarily
developed by contact with a stern world. It is natural to cite, by way of
example, that sometime lady of Beaujeu, Anne of France, a figure after
Michelangelo’s own heart, grand and severe as a cathedral.
We picture her always in her capacity as regent—the politician, soldier,
and diplomate upholding the fortunes of France, and displaying in the
greatest difficulties her incomparable genius. And yet her heart was
not in this work; she filled her part as a family duty, she devoted
herself to it entirely, but it was the cross of her life. As soon as
she could she forsook her toilsome life of affairs, for no other reason
than to return to the life of the affections. She shirked neither toil
nor responsibilities, and understood perhaps more fully than anyone
else the profound and mysterious joy experienced by lofty souls in
impressing their own individuality widely upon others. But she was only
too conscious that in plying a man’s trade she was acting like a widow or
an elder sister, not like a free woman or a princess, and that neither
politics nor military service was directly conducive to happiness. She
knew that in crushing rebels she would not make them happy, and that she
herself would be the first victim of her devotion.
She was right. We know how, in the swing of the political pendulum, she
fell beneath the strokes of Louise of Savoy,[154] who owed everything to
her. Wounded in her liveliest interests, in her dearest affections, in
the sentiment of dignity she held so high, she died proudly, as Caesar
died, with her mantle wrapped about her:
Elle attendoit venir l’heure opportune
Que la justice ou Dieu y mist la main,[155]
as a servant of Francis I. wrote.
Her coldness then was assumed, but she kept up the appearance of Stoicism
so well that many a man, even among her friends and admirers, really
believed in this lamentable insensibility. Again, Anne of France had
no love for the vanities, the whole trivial round of court life; “she
dismissed Cypris to Paphos,” for which some persons found it difficult
to forgive her, particularly Octovien de Saint-Gelais, who nevertheless
has extolled her sweetness, calling her “a second Semiramis, a new Queen
of the Amazons, come to life again to establish peace.” Her vigorous
intellect, her frank and remorselessly sincere disposition, her way of
treating everything on broad and general lines, puzzled the rude yet
feeble folk around her. The only thing she lacked, as one of her friends
said, was love:
S’elle avoit un peu de cella,
Ce seroit la plus accomplye
A qui Dieu donna oncques vie.[156]
She had a large, indeed an immeasurable quantity of “that,” but she took
it seriously; it might well be said that she did not set “her whole
imagination spinning round problems of sentiment.” She had no idea of
bringing imagination into her affections, but distrusted it; it was
through the soul and the real needs of the soul that she caught glimpses
of the ideal life of which we have just spoken. But having faith in,
rather than enthusiasm for, these ideas, and considering as she did
that the heart’s activities were perfectly reasonable, beneficent and
necessary, she saw no reason for ruffling, gilding or engarlanding
them. She was somewhat lacking in suppleness, self-sacrificing, of
unbounded good-heartedness, staid in demeanour, firm in resolution,
but also warm, passionate, loving to devote herself to others and not
doing so by halves. In her heart of hearts she adored all that a good
woman adores—her son, a poor child whose death almost killed her, her
daughter, her son-in-law, whom she loved as a son; she took an ardent
delight in friendship, and above all in that special, delicate, tender,
profound affection which is only established between a man and a woman;
to win love was her sole ambition.[157] She buried deep down in her heart
an innocent romance which no historian has related and which even her
intimates appear never to have suspected—a reserve which paints her to
the life! Till the day of her death she wore a ring on her finger. We
have discovered her secret: the ring was the pledge of her betrothal to
a young duke of Calabria from whom her father had separated her, who had
soon afterwards died, but whom she was never able to forget.
This certainly was one of the women most likely to understand and to
promulgate throughout France the programme of the quest for happiness.
She did not believe with Du Four that a sort of passive naïveté was
the ultimate expression of virtue; she sought another goal, anxious,
doubtless, that love should give a powerful stimulus to woman’s
activities, as it had done for the women of Spain, whose imagination was
filled with Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. Her friend Champier has rounded
off her thought by recalling Plato’s saying that “the lover is dead to
himself and lives in another.” Deeply read in the church fathers and the
philosophers, she hailed with joy the principle of platonic love, “the
love of which the philosopher speaks, that is, a love founded on purity.”
For all her lofty station, however, Anne of France never found herself
able to popularise her ideas in a country where an idea only succeeds
when it becomes a fashion; the new philosophy had perforce to come like
a flood, sweeping good and evil along with it, and imposing itself by
the authority of the court. That is what happened around Francis I.; as
soon as it became a mark of good taste to talk philosophy and occult
sciences,[158] Hellenism,[159] and above all Italianism, and to adopt
ultramontane fashions wholesale, people chattered about Plato. The king
dearly loved the ladies, and could not despise anything that glorified
the sex. He set some store by “Noble-Heart,” “Feminine Noblesse,”[160]
and other subtle evocations of the old chivalry; he hoped that platonism
might succeed in renewing them, and requested Castiglione, the oracle of
the new school, to furnish a pendant to his _Courtier_, to be called
“The Courtesan.” Castiglione declined this flattering invitation.
When Francis I. ascended the throne it was as a member of a sort of
triumvirate, the other two being ladies—“a single heart in three bodies.”
Louise of Savoy, aged and old-fashioned, reserved politics as her
sphere, as far as possible; Francis retained the pageantry, the money,
the passages at arms, the material satisfactions of power; Margaret of
France, in the Italian style, assumed the direction of men’s minds and
souls; she was far more queen of intellectual France than Duchess of
Alençon or Queen of Navarre.
She so completely identified herself with her brother as avowedly to
borrow from him her whole status, and particularly her name. People
have called her by the most various names without really understanding
why, owing to the fact that she usually adopted her brother’s name,
which frequently changed. As sister of the count of Angoulême she called
herself Margaret of Angoulême; under Louis XII., as sister of the Duke of
Valois and the heir to the throne, she called herself Margaret of Valois
or of Orleans; as sister of the king she became Margaret of France, her
definitive name, under which she accomplished her mission.
For thirty years she presided thus over an amazing intellectual movement;
the whole thinking soul of France hung upon her smile. She was the
incarnation of platonism.
In one of the galleries of Chantilly, that sanctuary of the Renaissance,
her grand face, with its long, severe, clean-cut, distinguished features,
somewhat hard as though chiselled out of alabaster, continually smiles
upon us and encourages us. Her eyes are clear and full of fire; her
mouth is fine, intellectual, with something of irony, of benevolence
and of reserve; something at once yielding and defensive, acerbated
and enthusiastic, a singular sibylline countenance, the enigma of a
spiritual governance—the rule of mind and heart; a woman to the core,
attractive and wishing to attract, but two personalities in one, each
interpenetrating the other, concealing her real self within two or three
inner entrenchments after the old feudal tactics, like St. Theresa in her
“fortresses of the soul.”
She reigned with undivided sway, with all the powers of her affection,
with her infinite womanly delicacy, with triumphant skill.
She was in very truth a woman of fire, this woman who wrote to her
brother while a prisoner in Spain: “Whatever may be required of me,
though it be to fling to the winds the ashes of my bones to do you
service, nought will be strange, or difficult, or painful to me, but
solace, ease of mind, honour.”
And she was loved; men never tired of praising her. Her name became a
household word, and lives on even in our own day in charming books, like
that devoted to her by a lady of rare genius, chosen by Nature to revive
the traditions of woman’s influence—the Countess d’Haussonville. And
yet we are always wondering what is behind that smiling countenance at
Chantilly.
Margaret is doubly complex, first as a woman, and then as a typical woman
of the sixteenth century. She is essentially a woman of her period, and
that is why she cannot but interest us. Her thoughts, somewhat hazy,
and sometimes wrapped in rather odd garbs, are difficult to co-ordinate
because, unlike those of Anne of France, they have no spontaneity or
originality. Almost all of them are derived from without. Her lovable
mind is like a mountain peak of fair height, with nothing rugged or
bleak about it: it promises no sublime effects, no Pisgah sights; it
pleases and interests us precisely because we can reach its summit by
an easy road, for which many of us are grateful. Is not that better for
poor tired folk than lofty masculine heights profitless and perilous to
scale? It springs gently from the landscape, like the pleasant mountains
in the heart of France, and while enabling us to take observation of
the sky, keeps in touch with the earth, and from this standpoint we
can contemplate, spread out like a map, a smiling country and highly
decorative craters. It is the “Belvedere” _par excellence_. Nowhere could
we judge her period better than from the vantage ground of her mind.
But it is very clear that it would be a mistake persistently to look for
in her the peaks and abysses she does not possess. It has been proved
to demonstration that, given certain circumstances—if, for example, he
had only been killed at the siege of Toulon—Napoleon would have died a
captain of artillery; and doubtless Margaret of France, but for the
accession of her brother, the wave of feminine Italianism, and possibly
many other circumstances, would have died wife of the Duke of Alençon
or the King of Navarre, or even less. Yet we can realise better than
ever to-day how vastly important her leadership was. Her generation was
that from which we are sprung, to which we owe our blood and sinews.
Our society is experiencing almost the same uncertainties and the same
attacks; it needs intelligent and active women as much as ever. Margaret
was less bent on being an exceptional woman than on fulfilling her part
as first lady of France. She played her part very well; she had her
Pléiade.[161] And at her side she brought up as her successor another
Margaret, her niece, the future Duchess of Berry and of Savoy, who did in
fact continue the tradition—not less amiable, not less distinguished, but
coming later and consequently more charming still, and above all, more
calm and self-contained.
Margaret of France had never read Plato until towards the end of her
life, and then, when she discovered him, she believed she had found
her guiding star. On the other hand, she did not permit Boccaccio to
be forgotten. Her philosophy, then, was not very psychological, but
it was eminently social. The theories of Bembo seemed to her to endow
women with a large and beneficent measure of power; and that was enough.
It must be confessed, however, that she looked at social questions
themselves from a somewhat superior standpoint, and with a necessarily
discriminating favour. She knew but one person, her brother, who even in
the most manifest errors appeared to her the ideal of perfection, “the
true Christ.” Apart from him she loved none but God, and she adopted as
her emblem a marigold turned towards the sun, indicating her purpose to
live and breathe only “for high, celestial and spiritual things”; other
things, husbands included, seemed to her paltry and mean. And thus, as a
woman of intelligence, she hoped to reign through the affections; her
most assiduous flatterers only extolled her heart; even after her death a
pious respect continued to watch over her works, of which a selection was
published. And yet she gave only her intelligence to the world.
Her theory of love is peculiar enough. Love of course appears to her the
corner-stone of the social edifice: in itself it is always good, only
becoming bad by the use made of it. Margaret is eminently platonist in
the sense that she proclaims the existence of two loves, a good and a
bad; but to her the distinction between them is simplicity itself: the
one is man’s love, the other, woman’s; men love with an evil, earthly
love, women alone can love celestially. Sometimes they chance to allow
themselves to be caught in the snares of men; let them flee then, for
“briefest follies are always the best.” Thus loving is for women. The
love of a woman, established firmly in God and on honour, the same love
that Henri d’Albret styles “hypocrisy or covert malice,” forges a divine
and holy chain. Margaret never tires of expatiating on the virtues of
women’s love, a pure and ardent love, the instrument and the end of
civilisation, the highest form of human activity, the prayer admirable
beyond all other prayers that a living creature can address to the
Creator. In the nineteenth tale of the _Heptameron_ she gives this love a
very catholic definition, borrowed almost word for word from Castiglione:
“I call perfect lovers those who seek some perfection, either goodness,
beauty or grace, in the object of their love, those who incline always
to virtue and have so lofty and refined a heart that, even at the price
of death, they would not aim at base things that honour and conscience
condemn. The soul was created but to return to the supreme good, and
so long as it is encased in the body, it can only long and strive for
holiness. But the sin of our first parent has rendered dark and sensual
the senses, the soul’s inevitable intermediary; seeing only through them
the visible objects which approach perfection, the soul hastens to find
in outward beauty, in visible grace and the moral virtues, the sovereign
beauty, grace, and virtue. It seeks them, and finds them not, and passes
by; it essays to mount higher, like children who, as they grow bigger,
must needs change their dolls. And when at length mature experience
shows that neither perfection nor felicity is to be met with in this
world, the soul pants after the great Author and the very source of the
beautiful. But then may God open its eyes! otherwise it must speedily
stray into the paths of false philosophy. For faith alone can reveal and
bestow what is good, which carnal, natural man by himself never could
attain.”
Thus the worship of beauty is not necessarily mystical, but it is a true
religion. We come from God, and we return to God through hope and love
much more surely than through any sort of reasoning. The holy love of the
beautiful, of perfection, purifies the soul better than any practical
efforts, and little by little raises it to the ideal perception of
perfect beauty. The soul then wings its flight towards God, sustained by
faith above unfathomable abysses.
And so it is necessary to proclaim happiness, peace, gentleness, joy to
men of good will, and even to others, if they are to be lifted above
themselves, their ambitions, their hatreds, their coarsenesses. What
a mistake it is to preach a religion of terror to poor creatures too
wretched as it is!
Oh, que je voy d’erreur la teste ceindre
A ce Dante, qui nous vient icy peindre
Son triste Enfer et vieille Passion.[162]
Let women learn their duty!
They are priestesses in the religion of Beauty.
They must win love, they must themselves love! They must be balm poured
upon aching wounds, the beauty that soothes, the love that accomplishes
a new Passion, taking upon itself all the sorrows of others. Of old, a
great noble had been recognised by his knowing how to give, and by his
giving, not of his superfluity, but a portion of himself—his blood to
his country, his strong arm or his affection to his brethren. It only
remained to feminise and spiritualise this superb tradition. Women
will give their hearts, in other words, they will diffuse happiness,
fellowship in the supreme life, life itself! “Love is that which really
makes a man, and without which he is nought.”
Life! Alas! at this word Margaret shudders. She longs to penetrate the
great secret of our destiny. She stoops over one of her gentlewomen
lying at the point of death, to see if she can catch the passing of her
soul! She receives a lover at the tomb of the lady he came to meet,
and with a tragic gesture cries “She is there!” She loves and preaches
nothing but life. She knows that death is inevitable, but hopes that this
accident may come to her without lingering in long “suburbs,” and she
casts herself with confidence upon the God of platonism whom she believes
in, whom she feels to be all love. From terrestrial love she expects to
escape at one bound into the arms of the other, the Great Love; “from
the felicity which alone in this world can be called felicity, to fly
suddenly to that which is eternal.”[163] And thus in her eyes man’s
natural end is enfolded in love and hope resting on faith. There, in the
heart of the villages, covered with moss and honeysuckle, are the humble
tombs, the sacred shelter of those we have loved, clothed all about with
life hard by the radiant crucifix! A sunbeam floods them in light, like a
stream of love from on high. The same ray penetrates our hearts, telling
us that all is not ended, and that a little joy is still blossoming upon
this spot of earth. Let us leave God to count the flying moments—leave it
to Him in full confidence and peace!
Like all human things, platonism cannot attain perfection; it necessarily
has little to say in regard to man’s birth and death. To complete
the reformation it would perhaps be necessary, as Goethe suggests
in the second part of _Faust_, to discover a means of manufacturing
_homunculus_, in other words, of effecting human reproduction in some
other way than the old; moreover, instead of being allowed to die,
men might comfortably be translated to other worlds. But, meanwhile,
platonism is the philosophy of the living, and in truth it is remarkable
to see a secular movement basing itself on such lofty systems, and
turning to such noble account, intellectually, morally and religiously,
the natural desire which the world always has of amusing itself.
A strange generation was arising. Between 1483 and 1515 Luther, Calvin
and St. Ignatius, Rabelais and St. Theresa, were born pell-mell. And
yet, thanks to this philosophy, everyone wore the livery of happiness.
Dagger and poison hid themselves in the shade. Never were the most
agitating problems more cheerfully discussed. Yes; women know the real
value of the visionary and the immaterial, of something higher than
hoards of mere gold and silver—the value of the riches of the soul. The
Latin world was at this moment becoming a vast workshop of beauty, the
real worker being no longer the digger or the merchant, the mason or
the hodman, but whatever man lived a life of thought and love. There
was extension and broadening out in all directions; material barriers
were being overthrown; the religion of Beauty was bringing nations
as well as individuals together. And the women, the ministers of the
affections, had for their mission to watch, to judge, to temper, to
develop the faculties of men. They thought it a beautiful mission. Can
we wonder at it? They burned with the ardour of paladins; they fancied
themselves knights-errant, and displayed devices—_Non inferiora secutus_,
a masculine hemistich which men had relinquished, but which Margaret of
France resumed, to show that she bore high her white petals and her heart
of gold: “Love and Faith,” in other words, “Women and God,” the motto of
Madame de Lorraine—a motto full of joy and charm, for if men love because
they believe, and believe because they love, life becomes an unalloyed
delight.
Between mysticism and debauchery a middle term had been found, namely,
love.
When women know how to attach men to them by means of pure love, all
individual forces gain vigour, a nation flourishes, and the people are at
peace.
That, at any rate, was the new conviction.
CHAPTER II
THE SCIENCE OF PLATONISM
The doctrine we have just indicated never excited any very determined
opposition as a theory; its adversaries reserved their objections for
its practical working. The New Law, it is true, had redeemed us in love;
but the politicians held the same opinions as the moralists of Du Four’s
school. From Machiavelli to Calvin, many men thought the bludgeon a
simpler and more effectual guide for humanity than sentiment. At best
they would have favoured a sort of sentimental sociology. They regarded
everything else as a mere philosophic dream—Eden, of which barely a
glimpse had been caught before it was guarded by the angel with the
terrible sword; the burning bush from which issued the voice of God, but
near which Moses dared not kneel for fear his garments should take fire
and the flame scorch his flesh.
Assuredly, the practical science of platonism is more difficult than its
metaphysic; it assumes that women have the knack of cleverly taming men
by means of love’s blandishments, without getting scratched themselves.
The cleverest lion-tamers are sometimes clawed, but they have been
known to die in their beds. Here is the question in a nutshell: Are
women capable of following this tamer’s vocation and making themselves
sufficiently invulnerable? and secondly: Are men tamable?
On the first point the friends of the beautiful displayed the utmost
confidence. They made their appeal to women, sensitive—more than
sensitive, refined—fortified by marriage against materialities, and
inspired only with disgust by the vulgar vice that came under their
eyes and even in their own circle. As Du Bellay says, Cato’s manners
harmonised perfectly with Plato’s discourses. Margaret of France
unhesitatingly descended into the den and grappled with her friend
Bonnivet.[164] She believed in the invulnerability of women, as also
did Castiglione and many others. The platonists found no difficulty in
justifying their position; they cited heroic examples of feminine virtue
even in the remotest antiquity, and they met other admirable examples in
the ordinary intercourse of life. Castiglione and Dolce show us women who
in the vilest environments were angels of chastity. In most cases they
were young girls, for instance a poor girl of Capua (very often cited)
who flung herself into a river to escape a troop of Gascons; a poor
peasant girl of Mantua, who, betrayed by a scoundrel, drowned herself
with a sort of frenzy, flinging away all the ropes held out to her—a
tragic suicide, anti-Christian as such, yet so Christian in its grandeur
of despair that the Bishop of Mantua proposed to erect a statue to this
noble woman of the people. Unhappily he died before he could carry out
his idea; in those days people fought shy of inartistic statues.
Such examples of virtue were not met with only among the lower classes,
which are naturally the most exposed to danger. All Rome was stirred to
its depths by the dreadful fate of a young gentlewoman who, having been
decoyed into the catacombs of St. Sebastian with the connivance of a
maidservant, strangled herself rather than yield to the violence of the
miscreant who devised the snare. She might well have been left to rest
in the dim twilight of those silent vaults, where so many pure victims
sleep under the seal of a cross and a dove; but Rome could not leave this
flower of virtue to be forgotten, even in so sacred a spot: the poor body
was crowned with laurel and borne in triumph like a trophy through the
thronged streets of the city, the same fever of enthusiasm infecting both
hovel and palace.
No, women are not naturally sensual; animalism is utterly abhorrent to
them, and however much their education may have been neglected, their
deepest feelings are won by a man’s intellectual qualities, his moral
authority, much more than by his physical beauty, a beauty often hard
to trace. When they love deeply, even when they yield themselves, it
is still with a sentiment of reserve and modesty; it would also seem
as if they cannot dispense with the additional refinement of respect.
Man, on the contrary, as all the world knows, has no sense of shame,
and to get every possible enjoyment, love or no love, is his only aim.
It is to singularly terrestrial Venuses that peoples and kings, judges
and culprits, flock pell-mell. Is this a reason for despair? Cannot
the obvious feebleness of women, their delicacy, the almost religious
character of their love, become an element of attraction and power?
Women, we are told, deliberately expose themselves to sharp tussles. That
is true. But if men were platonic, what merit would women have in being
platonic too? And surely no one would impose on men, as the first rule
of intercourse, the obligation of remaining in marble coldness beside
beautiful creatures of passion, whose very nature is to set their pulses
throbbing! “Ah! impossible!” cries Margaret of France, to whom the mere
idea seems almost an insult. It is wise to recognise danger, but it
would be disgraceful to flee from it! In France, a country hostile to
the beautiful and to sentiment, the women who preached the gospel of
love were, as we have said, high-born dames, whose very position made
them wardens of men’s souls, and whose nobleness constituted part of
the public patrimony. Maybe they did not believe themselves predestined
to impeccability; but while enjoying a wonderful store of goodness and
benevolence, they were at the same time proud, high-strung, courageous.
Far from terrifying, peril inspirited them; to shrink from it would
have appeared disgraceful to Anne of France, who represents prudence
incarnate. Women are not so frail as people are pleased to say. They are
only frail when they wish to be; and then it is duty that guides their
steps.
The real difficulty, then, does not lie in this direction. The difficulty
is to discover a sure method of capturing men. We have already outlined
the two theories; there are likewise two practical systems.
The first consists in really devoting heart and soul to the matter, the
second in the mere playing of a part. The first is concrete, actual,
full of zest and energy; the second is nothing but abstractions,
coquetry, poses, and never extends beyond mere sentimentality. Anne of
France, manifestly wedded to the first system, speaks of it with a warmth
and yet with a wealth of circumlocution that show, not only how much the
question interested her, but how troublesome she found it.
A woman, she thinks, should not push enthusiasm so far as to run to meet
love; she may wait for it, it comes soon enough unsought. In spite of her
very real simplicity, she always impresses us as having a touch of pride;
and besides, she was writing for her daughter. But what a noble heart is
hers, how ardent and how generous! She distrusts the love excited merely
by physical beauty, because she regards it as imperfect, undistinguished,
commonplace, of little stability, subject to all sorts of disappointments
and regrets; but no less—accustomed as she is to deal with things broadly
and grandly—does true love, that which wells up from the heart and mind,
and is only strengthened and sanctified with increasing years, seem to
her precious and firm. When a man can analyse his love and tell himself
that it depends on some definable beauty, however exquisite—that of the
eyes, perhaps, or that of a charming manner or an uncommon mind—in this
case the love is slight. But when it takes entire possession of him, when
he knows not how to describe it nor to what to attribute it, when it
surprises him in the plenitude of his vigour, and keeps him in subjection
to another person of whose will he becomes the mere echo; above all,
when it inspires him with the overpowering consciousness that henceforth
his life may be bounded by no other horizon: then it has a superb range;
it possesses soul and heart; the rest is merely supplementary—a more
complete intimacy, a pledge of affection. The woman a man most loves is
not the one he covets most. At twenty it is easy to confuse sensations
with sentiments; and that is why true love is not known till later. It
is a gradual unfolding; and then it becomes so ardent as to bring into
play all the impulsive forces of the mind. It is by this new emotional
fruitfulness, by this responsiveness, so to speak, to the spur, that a
man’s worth is measured. Externally, on their commonplace side, all men
are alike; their souls alone have different physiognomies: a time comes
when they are stirred to the depths, shaken out of themselves, and then
it is seen that there are great souls and small. Not too great, however,
nor too small; but quite human! We cannot expect miracles, or look for
the perfection God has reserved for Himself. But sometimes the reality
is better than appearances promise: “’Tis not the cowl that makes the
monk.” We should not be too ready to take fright at an inconsistency, or
to despair of men who err by excess of genuine sensibility. These are the
easiest to convert.
Anne of France believes in a method of princely candour. She objects to
any woman, with the best intentions in the world, appearing to promise
what she is firmly resolved never to grant; in this regard it would be
better to retreat at once, with no false shame, and quietly await another
occasion for giving battle.
If, on the other hand, love presents itself under reassuring aspects, it
may be accepted. Honourable love is so beautiful, so full of “benefits
and honours”! But precisely because it is so delightful a condition it is
rare, and the devil leaves nothing undone to poison it, and therefore it
is well to advance with much practical prudence, even with distrust! The
world is so vile! Sweet love has often come to a bad end! In discussing
this tender and mournful psychology, the great princess would seem, under
her mask of impassibility as a philosophical woman, to utter a cry of
pain as though bleeding from an internal wound: “I have known a knight,”
she says, “who heaped oath on oath of the most sacred character, even
on the holy altars, on the gospel, and who did not keep them even till
the evening.” She is one of those who, giving the heart, give it wholly,
and how perilous that is is manifest. A genuine platonist, however, she
acknowledges no degrees in honour; there is no splitting it up; it must
be preserved in its entirety: and the primitive, strenuous, almost naïve
lady concludes that chastity does not consist solely in “saving oneself
from the overt act.” Among the women who skate more venturously near the
danger point there is not one in a thousand, she thinks, but has lost
something of her honour or of her illusions.
Of this sculptural view of love—majestic, holy, like certain of Wagner’s
harmonies, but necessarily very rare—Michelangelo is a practical
exemplification.
Madly smitten, at the age of fifty-one, with a lady of thirty-six, whom,
however, he did not see till twelve years later; so mastered by his
agitation as to pen two extraordinary letters—which, incomprehensible
as they appear, Messieurs Milanesi, Gotti and Mézières have succeeded
in interpreting—writing one letter three times over without making
up his mind to send it (it never was sent)—that was the man known as
Michelangelo.
Why did he love the Marchioness of Pescara! For her beauty? No. For
her wit? No. He loved her because he loved her: there is no more to be
said. He asked nothing of her. She was the woman of his heart; to her he
dedicated all the fibres of his being. He saw with her eyes, acted by her
inspiration, “no longer conscious of aught but the memory of her.” And he
was happy, and unhappy. What energy of expression there is in his sonnets
when his vigour bursts out in passionate laments! But for the most part
this vigour seems itself to yield to respect and enthusiasm.
A genuine patrician, sweet and unaffected, the marchioness understood
with wonderful intuition the man who was addressing her, and proved what
in such a case a woman may do with a man. Condivi, who had seen her
correspondence, described it as full of a grave and profoundly moving
love; the fragments which have come down to us indicate a thousand little
tendernesses: “Our friendship is stable, and our affection very sure; it
is tied with a Christian knot.” And here is the address outside a letter:
“To my more than magnificent and more than very dear Messer Michelangelo
Buonarotti.”
It was the same with their talks together; love only served to give
their conversation an elevated tone. A certain François de Hollande,
who happened one day to be in their company, has preserved some
characteristic fragments of their conversation. The marchioness was
formulating quite a scheme of splendid idealism: “Painting,” she said,
“better than any other means, enables us to see the humility of the
saints, the constancy of the martyrs, the purity of the virgins, the
beauty of the angels, the love and charity with which the seraphim burn;
it raises and transports mind and soul beyond the stars, and leads us
to contemplate the eternal sovereignty of God.... If we desire to see
for ourselves a man renowned for his deeds, painting shows us him to
the life. It brings before our eyes the image of a beauty far removed
from our experience, and Pliny held this to be a service of priceless
value. The widow in her affliction finds solace in gazing every day
upon her husband’s picture; young orphans owe to painting the happiness
of recognising, when they have come to man’s estate, the features of a
beloved father.”
Is not this true love, to love the beautiful, the object of love to so
many besides ourselves? Is not this the enchanting joy dreamed of by Anne
of France, so sweet for a woman, and lifting a man “beyond the stars”?
But this love is terribly individual and exclusive!
Twenty years later Michelangelo lost the lady of his soul. He stood by
her death-bed. With reverence and pity he pressed a long kiss upon her
hand, not daring, even at that tragic moment when Death purifies all
things, to touch ever so lightly that pale cold brow; though many a time,
in truth, he regretted the timidity of his farewell. Condivi tells us
that he was frantic with grief. Night had closed her wings upon his life;
he could never hear the marchioness mentioned without tears starting in
his eyes: “We had a great mutual regard,” he said; “Death has snatched
from me a great friend.” A great friend! He became religious; in his
robust old age his soul maintained its fire, like some deep pool which,
in the blackness of night, still reflects the sunset glow. He died at
the age of ninety, and among his papers were found the letters of the
marchioness, and the sonnets he wrote for her—though cunning pilferers
had carried off a portion of these, which, unhappily, they kept for
themselves.
The other, and more numerous, school of platonists started from an
absolutely different principle. It was much less individual, and much
more sociological. It was cultured, to all appearance without enthusiasm,
keenly sensitive, wholly of this world, or if it moved at all toward
the ideal it was by many tortuous, obscure and labyrinthine paths of
which it would sometimes be difficult to draw an accurate map. It was
philosophical; its method was to coax the human animal, to converse
with him, to lure him with smiles and soft words, and to wind about him
a multitude of slender cords till he was reduced to helplessness. The
method was considered eminently laudable, and indeed it demanded infinite
tact, time and patience; for what was involved was nothing less than the
training of “the other partner” in habits of refinement and discretion—to
content himself with a few tit-bits of love or kindliness, to refrain
from constantly showing teeth and claws with a cry for his “reward”—the
wolfish cry, the roar of the beast of prey! A light hand was needed. Men,
snared in cold blood, appeared so commonplace, so much alike!
The little favours by which men were held captive were in no way open
to censure; they were virtue itself, for the end justified the means.
The art which regulated the dispensation of these favours may justly
be regarded as a complicated one. It grew out of long habit, and was
not learnt from books; it was the Machiavelism of a special charity, a
supreme devotion, very often the immolation of self; and it was precisely
this admirable feature which distinguished platonism from coquetry: “O
Love!” cried Bembo, “it is by thee that the higher virtues rule the
lower.” How many of these strange, admirable women might be mentioned,
who devoured men like veritable Minotaurs, and who, after devouring them,
would have liked to resurrect them for another meal!
The Marchesa Scaldasole, of Pavia, was one of these terrible harpies;
yet she acted with absolute frankness. One day, at a ball, she said to a
young protonotary named De Lescun, who was losing his head a little: “You
see, I do as your guards do, who fix a tassel to their horses’ cruppers,
to warn people not to go too near,” and she pointed to her sky-blue
dress: in Italy, blue denoted heavenward aspirations. Lescun was devoured
like the rest. By a strange freak of fate, he happened to be severely
wounded beneath the walls of Pavia in the famous battle of Francis I.
When he was picked up, covered with blood, he asked to be carried to
the house of his “dear lady and patroness.” The marchesa received these
quivering shreds of humanity with transports of tenderness, and it was in
her arms, sustained by her loving look and consoled by her pious words,
that Lescun breathed his last.
I know not how La Rochefoucauld could say: “The first lover is kept long
when no second is taken.” It is the vice of men not to know when to
stop. Nothing grieved Margaret of France like the thought that a man,
to qualify as a “man of honour” and a “pleasant companion,” was expected
to kill someone for giving him the lie, and to love a dozen women. She
objected strongly to a happily settled man, as she says, going prowling
over the world, were it ever so platonically: “it is wisest to remain
satisfied where love has once attached us.”
The women, on the contrary, anxious to fulfil their social duty,
thought themselves bound to sow love broadcast, to distribute their
favours widely; by that means they protected themselves against the
tongue of malice, though at the cost of desperately hard work and many
embarrassments. For every man of intelligence and breeding who knows
better than to display too much whimsicality, how many jealous, touchy,
tiresome men there are! A princess could do no less than be kind to a
number of favourites; Margaret of France loved not far short of a dozen,
and the number was only so small because of the difficulty of finding
recruits for platonism.
We must remember the idea from which these women started, which was
absolutely the reverse of that which now prevails. In these days
women are careful not to generalise; they prefer to personalise
everything—medicine in the doctor, religion in the priest, the family
in the husband, love in the lover. The women of the sixteenth century,
we cannot repeat too often, had an ardent faith in things, but none at
all in men; they had no intention whatever of being in bondage to a man,
whoever he was, but preferred to go straight to the idea, and then to
make its interpreter their apostle, or what they pleased. They were in
love with love, but were unquestionably prone to regard the lover as of
secondary importance, or at the most as the minister of their cult, not
their master. Trustfulness and self-surrender struck them as delightful,
desirable, religious, almost necessary, when based on a broad principle
of liberty, and when they furnished a goal at which the affections might
aim.
We must insist also on another most important consideration, which the
reader will already have suspected. These ladies did not labour for their
personal happiness; in most cases they had no hope of ever attaining
it. They discovered a means of giving life to others, but lacked it for
themselves; they had known either too much or too little of existence.
They were dissatisfied—out of conceit—with everything, perhaps with
themselves; they had been mothers, and were yet maids. For the soul, like
the body, needs to give itself, and on this condition depends its life
and fruitfulness. Now many of these women had shadowy and inscrutable
souls—souls whose pages no one had troubled to turn; they smothered their
feelings, but they had suffered much, and still suffered. Hitherto they
had given only their body, the poorest part of them, the contaminated
part, the part that is lost in the giving; while the soul is ennobled
and purified by self-surrender. They had perforce to cut themselves in
two, and as maidens to look on at the ruin of one part of themselves, and
nothing was more painful than this cleavage; philosophers even maintained
that it was an impossible one, and that, when a woman yielded her body,
under obligation or necessity, sometimes with disgust, she gave nothing,
but remained immaculately a virgin, because the true virginity is that
of the heart. Indeed, a favourite idea of that time was that whatever
vicissitudes the bodily mechanism might undergo, only the soul could
endorse them.
Here, then, were unhappy dilettanti of love, who, regarding animal
passion as the antipodes, almost the negation, of true passion,
rigorously safeguarded their purity, and adopted platonism as the
channel through which to bestow their souls on mankind, with a smiling
disenchantment, almost happy in possessing at least the assurance that
in this harmless game there would be only occasional outbursts of the
violence of love. They chose the good part, sowing broadcast, in a soil
often ungrateful, the seeds of a love of which they had been harshly
deprived, and the fruits of which they hoped probably that others would
gather. Many of them had lovers, but true love comes only once, and
among these charming women, all fire in appearance, there were some who
bore, deep down in their hearts, an unsuspected burden of sorrow which
oppressed and overwhelmed them. With some of them passion had never
ceased to rumble; some had been seen to become desperately attached to
a man (maybe their own husband), or even to fling themselves into a
nunnery. The most of them, more sick than those they wished to cure, and
faltering inwardly under the outward charms of their devotion, went
their way, vainly seeking in life’s desert the heart, the one only heart,
sensitive enough to comprehend them. They steered their way composedly
among the billows, in complete security, alas! and without adventuring
anything but their good sense, at most their good nature, which Anne
of France severely calls their hypocrisy. Ah! how they smart for this
hypocrisy! How much of their life-blood it costs them! We yearn to strip
off their veils, to beseech them to take thought for themselves and
put some faith in passion! But no, they lead our woful procession like
singing children, and, forcing back their tears like Margaret of France,
they strew a few rose-leaves in our doleful path:
De petits amours à fleurettes,
D’autres petites amourettes,
Mesmement de vieilles amours,[165]
—_Voiture._
and the sole benefit is reaped by us, or at least by men capable of
enjoying an illusion. Sometimes, in their infinite goodness, they may
give us divine moments that compensate for the painfulness of life; they
succeed in thrilling us with that magnetic influence which quickens our
faculties, sends our life into a wider channel, makes commonplace actions
seem interesting to us, gives higher relief and brighter colour to all
our surroundings. They do a good work, a pious work, a social work. And
that is why this loveless love fell especially to the lot of princesses.
At first sight the idea of making love so excessively aristocratic
appears somewhat singular, if not repugnant. What is the value of
distinctions of birth in such a matter? To sincere hearts they can only
raise obstacles to genuine happiness. This was especially the opinion of
Anne of France. Could it be right to dignify with the name of love or
platonism a wretched coquetry which consisted in attaching oneself to
the most conspicuous women, whoever they were?—for some were plain, and,
what was worse, influential!—so that this so-called love would oscillate
between snobbishness and solicitation of the kind nowadays practised
upon a minister of state—whose ugliness does not matter. Assuredly it is
possible to love a plain woman with all one’s heart; such love, indeed,
is said to be the strongest. But how difficult it must have been in
those days for a princess to believe in a disinterested love! And even
supposing such happiness were hers, could she ever have relied upon it?
So the love of princesses, which was an essential characteristic
of platonism, sprang in reality from a very special principle. The
princesses (and other great ladies) had no experience whatever of the
sentiment (very masculine and somewhat modern) that everything was theirs
by right, and that a certain lofty egotism was the natural complement
of a lofty station. On the contrary, they imagined themselves to be the
property of society, so to speak, and not their own—and further, as they
realised that a great name is just as isolating and paralysing as a large
fortune, if not more so, they considered themselves specially bound to
keep their activities in full play. Their efforts were sweetened by their
pride. That the woman should have the castle and the man the cottage,
that she should be rich and he poor, seemed to them a good thing: it was
the subversion of old ideas, but the consecration of the idea that was
to be. They found a special charm in material inequalities of position;
it was often distressing to have to raise a man morally, but it was
delightful to raise him in a material sense; as Balzac has said, “No man
has ever been able to raise his mistress to his own level, but a woman
always places her lover as high as herself.”
This explains why, in the eyes of all the friends of the Beautiful at
that epoch, every princess was beautiful, in other words, she piloted
the world towards the idea of the Beautiful. Failing a princess, or a
lady of title, or an eminent woman,[166] a man might content himself
with a simple maid-of-honour; but it would be almost to fail in respect
towards princesses of the blood-royal not to fall in love with them,
since they were born for that end; and indeed a certain accent of ardour
did not displease them, for, as they told themselves, “everybody knows
that a fortress is only stormed when it seems hopeless to expect weakness
or treachery.”[167] Nothing flattered them more; in the admirable words
of Alfred de Vigny: “In the purest relationships of life there are
nevertheless things which are only poured into one single heart, as
into a chosen vessel.” This chosen vessel must be rare and delicately
fashioned, all compact of idealism, intellectuality and tenderness.
The love of princesses, therefore, however sincere and intoxicating,
manifested itself with crystal purity. When a poet makes extravagant
boast of the beauty of his mistress, who is sometimes of mature years,
we may be quite sure he means beauty of soul, “which is all-sufficient,”
as Margaret ingenuously says. The only misfortune of the princesses was
often their scant knowledge of the human heart; they saw too much of the
worldly, showy, conventional exterior, and it was that usually which made
them pessimists. But they exerted a powerful sway. And as their favours,
coming whence they did, had no important sequels, they were not niggardly
in bestowing them. Of what is not a woman capable who has nothing to
fear, either from herself or from others? In such a case there is danger
only for the man. Certain ladies took men and stirred them up, shook them
as you shake a tree whose fruit you desire to bring down. And, to tell
the truth, they were even taunted with carrying this science of theirs
too far. Margaret of France in particular has been generally regarded as
a consummate virtuoso; unquestionably she often puzzles us, and gives us
the uneasy feeling that she is making fools of us. She herself boasted of
juggling with the hearts of men, of “winning her devoted servants,” and
of managing them so well that literally they no longer knew what to make
of her. “The most daring,” she says, “were reduced to despair, and the
most down-hearted saw a ray of hope.”[168] So, while those who know her
story most intimately—Madame d’Haussonville, M. Anatole France, Madame de
Genlis—come forward as guarantees of her absolute virtue, those who, like
Brantôme, peep at her through the window regard her as a coquette, which
indeed was her mother’s opinion. Shall I confess it? I myself, during
the years, now no small portion of my life, which I have devoted to the
service of these adorable women, during the many long hours spent in
delightful intimacy with them, wholly absorbed in deciphering the enigma
of their hearts, have known and felt these singular perplexities. One day
the ladies have enchanted me, almost given me wings; another, they have
crushed me into the dust: one day I would fain kiss their hands with all
the ardour of a loyal worshipper; another, long to obliterate their very
footprints. Sometimes I have glowed with pride, fancying myself master
of this fervent love of which they used to speak so well; and thrilled
through and through with their overflowing enthusiasm I have seen the
world become transfigured behind them, our pale northern mists dissolve
in radiant colour, our sky become translucent—and next day I would trudge
mechanically behind them in utter mystification. Passion and irony have
in turn moved my pen, and having mutually slain each other, I know not
whether anything is left. And to-day even, when I am seeking earnestly
to lisp the praises of these ladies, when as the prize of serious and
constant effort I beseech of them some positive pledge of their thought,
they flit like butterflies before me!
Yet they had hearts, large hearts, it is impossible to doubt,—hearts
staunch and ardent; but they shrank from employing them. They dallied
in a dim twilight sensibility, like that noble lady of Genoa, Thomasina
Spinola, who had broken all material ties with her husband in order
to devote her thoughts to King Louis XII. One day the rumour spread,
falsely, that Louis was dead, and soon it was reported at Blois that
Thomasina was dead also. Thereupon the official poet recited an
interminable elegy. Happily, both Louis XII. and Thomasina had many years
to live. No one durst smile at matters so eminently respectable, though
Anne of France was indignant; in her opinion love was dishonoured by such
proceedings, and she would readily have forgiven men for not taking these
pleasant comedies too seriously.
Strange women! Perhaps they themselves dared not probe their souls!
The artists who painted them must have dropped their brush and peered
into the heart of their idol, and asked themselves whether it was a
Beatrice or a Venus they were painting. A strange veil covers their
features; as a skilful artist contents himself with vague suggestions
where a perfect rendering is impossible, so their souls have deliberately
blotted themselves in mist, blurring their outlines, and throwing us
into uncertainty. These women are frank, and reserved; they attract, and
repel; embrace us, and hold us at arm’s length; allure us, and alienate
us. Now they are like virgin soil, now like paths too many feet have
trod. Their contemporaries were baffled by them; we too may well fail to
comprehend this platonism—we who see it from afar.
Such is the magic haze in which Leonardo has enwrapped his Gioconda.
Everything is there, but he tells us nothing save that this is she.
He barely hints at her subtle mind, her soft, pure flesh; you seem to
catch a delicate perfume floating in the air. The world around her seems
sunk in torpor; the landscape fades away in indefinite and fantastic
suggestions. And the woman dominating it all pursues us with her complex
look—the look that all these women have; she seems to be several women
superimposed—a succession of appetites, a mingling of languors, thoughts
crowded on thoughts, an encumbrance of flesh. Voluptuousness and
intelligence are there too, held in reserve. She terrifies us, for she is
too richly endowed; she will give nothing: she is a woman of brains.
And yet we err in not trying to understand these women! We do not
understand them because we set them apart, picture them as solitary in
their defensive attitude, shutting our eyes to what engrosses their
mistrustful looks—the cruel welter of humanity around them.
With Anne of France and Vittoria Colonna we met Michelangelo. But
whom shall we find flocking about these gracious priestesses of love?
Contemptible drones, ambitious men, empty-headed fools, young fops,
youths anxious to push their way in the world, society clowns, scholars
in the sere and yellow leaf, a whole herd of men who have their reasons
for liking the tame cat’s rôle, and certainly would never think of love
unless someone mentioned it. Is it in any real sense cheating to cheat
such men? There are sceptics like the excellent Montaigne, who love in
order to find relief from their worries; others who love for a wager,
like Nifo, who went sweethearting because it amused Cardinal Pompeo
Colonna. There are pedants and hair-splitters; men who analyse and refine
and talk of social duty—speak too of their love for humanity at large,
for irrational things, for the All-in-all, for supernatural beings, for
the angels. They make love an amusement like dicing and racing. They tell
off on their fingers the various species of love.
Nifo amused himself by cataloguing the motives leading to love or
“re-love.” He found fifteen chief motives: (1) Youth. (2) Nobility (since
aristocracy springs from love, and love from aristocracy). (3) Wealth,
a tainted source, but abundant. (4) Power. It is to this last that he
maliciously ascribes the love of princesses, the best and most practical
of all. Ambitious by destiny, he says, princesses necessarily yearn for
glory; wherefore they are more accessible than others, and no one renders
love graver, loftier, more substantial. (5) Beauty, a very stimulating
factor, but secondary. (6) The mere rapture of the senses. Alas! many
women, even in the highest stations, must have owed shameful connections
to this cause! (7) Fame. The thought of hearing themselves sung about,
of seeing themselves in pictures and statues, of being analysed and made
the subject of dissertations, is a strong incentive to love: women love
posterity in this guise. (8) The love of love, the artistic pleasure
in knowing themselves loved, adored. (9) Elegant love, a matter of gay
doublets and a good stable. (10) Obsequious love, not very amusing, but
practical and very common; a love made up of little attentions, little
symbolic presents, balls and banquets; Nifo had seen Prince Ferdinand
of Salerno win his lady by means of a ball. And after these principal
categories, there come secondary inducements to love, which, in spite of
their commonness, are constantly successful; fine melodramatic rages,
comprising disdain, jealousy, frenzy—all excellent investments; or the
more peaceable and rudimentary means, such as entertainments (provided
they are intellectual), flattery (highly recommended), prayer, this too,
excellent, according to the maxim of Martial—
Nor prayer nor incense e’er did Jove despite.
Lovers have only too many methods to choose from, and the advantage of
these sentiments (generally feigned), is that thanks to them anybody,
however modest his resources, can find something to suit him; it is the
bazaar of love.
And thus raw individualism, the mainspring of human energy, was to become
transformed and to tend towards a collective end.
Poor women! they were under no illusion about the superficial effect they
for the most part produced; they knew that perhaps it would all amount
to no more than an outward show of improvement, and that at bottom man
would remain the vulgar and self-seeking creature he was.[169] This
thought confirmed them in their platonism and their virtue; if there was
no better result, they told themselves that, after all, to awaken mere
sensibility was not an absolute waste of time; that it was a merit to
refine vice, to “polish it up,” to drape it with hypocrisy, to rule men
and impress their intelligence even by indirect means: they found the
occupation every whit as interesting as piling up household linen or
polishing the furniture. They hoped that the future would justify their
devotion. After all their love was only a means; the end was to pour
upon life a little joy, a little balm, light, power, happiness—to shower
happiness everywhere.
CHAPTER III
THE MISSION OF BEAUTY
Before we can make others happy we must draw upon the sources of
happiness in our own nature and in the world around. It is reason’s
ungracious way to show us the realities of life in the mass, and even in
their darker aspects; it is aestheticism that turns their bright side to
us. Absolute ugliness does not exist, any more than absolute beauty, and
a careful analysis detects an element of beauty and love in everything.
The quest for this element is women’s work. In moulding us into beings
sensitive to the least manifestation of happiness, they restore us to
health.
Their first duty is to exhibit in themselves every loveable quality,
physical and moral; for platonism is not the art of loving, but the art
of guiding men towards happiness through love. Their second duty is to
make good use of the elements at their disposal, and force life to yield
the very pith and essence of the Beautiful. Or we may liken them to
conductors of orchestras, who draw unexpected tones out of space. How
noble, how difficult is the task! Surely there is enough in it to fill a
lifetime! What intelligence, what knowledge, what skill, even to charming
sympathetic accents from a stone, are needed! Platonism would be narrow
and inadequate indeed—would be indistinguishable from the most hackneyed
sentiments—if it were satisfied with the triumph of feminine coquetry,
and did not extend its mission to the whole of nature.
To render themselves beautiful and admirable, therefore, women will have
to make the most of their resources. Whatever their occupation, they can
always mingle with it something of the ideal, or turn it to the glory
of their sex, even if it is a mere matter of dining or of walking in a
meadow; how much more so if it is a question of the manifold usages of
social life, and more especially of its intellectual occupations! Through
their fostering care all things should become imbued with a sentiment of
peace and love, and tend in common towards happiness. That is where their
talent lies.
Clearly the method employed will vary according to circumstances,
situation, possibilities, temperaments. Different women will pursue
different aims, and avail themselves of different weapons; but, in the
long run, none was neglected. While therefore we cannot hope to produce
a thoroughly accurate picture, we shall pass in review the principal
circumstances which provide a lady with her means of action, starting in
logical order with the material and proceeding to the intellectual facts.
In the material universe, it is woman’s capital duty to possess what
pleases men; for here we are entering a purely practical field, and the
quest of the ideal is of much less moment than the skilful dressing of
the hook!
Physical beauty is not an indispensable condition of pleasing; on
the contrary indeed, a certain homely plainness does not come amiss,
platonically speaking. If many of the celebrated women whom we know only
in their portraits were to come to life again, perhaps we could not
resist their fascinations; but they are dead, and to us they are plain;
their plainness served them as a sort of lightning-conductor. We may go
even farther; true beauty was held suspect. As Anne of France severely
says, it is the most prejudicial and least valuable grace that God
can bestow on a woman, especially a princess. It is made too much of;
it inevitably jumbles the sentiments, mixing with the purest an alloy
of instability; there is always a risk of its upsetting the best-laid
schemes. A princess acknowledged as a beauty cannot choose her servitors;
she knows neither how far they will go nor perhaps how far she will go
herself. She seats her empire on very precarious foundations, since the
less sensual love is, the longer it endures. In fine, women are what
they are, and it is impossible to ask them to change. But any woman who
knows her duty may be asked to practise the feminine art, and this art is
called charm.
Many men do not know the meaning of the word “charm”; they speak of
beauty as savants or as grocers might, not as faithful worshippers.
If you pull women to pieces, if you judge them as you would a yard of
calico, a donkey or a slave, you will see naturally but a form of flesh;
you may estimate its geometrical dimensions, count on your fingers
thirty or thirty-six special beauties; if you profess an intellectual
standpoint, you will perhaps go so far as to measure the cranium,
and that will be all. You will be content as an artist to produce a
“semblance of life,” by dint of scrupulous attention to detail; you will
not perceive what it is that speaks to us, fascinates us. Charm is not
expressed in terms of arithmetic or algebra: it is an art, perhaps the
highest of all arts, because more than any other, more even than poetry
or music, it speaks from soul to soul; it is a sort of witchery, a
woman’s knack, as it were, of enveloping all around her in an invisible
net. It is not purely intellectual, but avails itself of physical means
and disdains everything in the way of formulae. The Italians, adoring
this delightful art, have vainly devoted innumerable and often very
prolix writings to the attempt to fathom it. All their reasonings are
condensed in this vague sentence of Firenzuola:[170] “A beautiful woman
is one who is universally pleasing”; and Firenzuola is no better able
than the rest to say why she is pleasing. If we were speaking of a good
housewife, it would be easy to catalogue her virtues: the talents of a
managing woman, a woman who can look after one’s health, keep the books
and train the children, have often been computed. Of a charming woman,
never! Each one has her own secret. And yet the art of charming is very
widespread. To that art the Italian women owed their positions as queens
of the world (or, to satisfy Montaigne, let us say the “regents”); they
were not superior to Frenchwomen in beauty of form or in originality
of soul, but among them there were more “beautiful women,” that is to
say, captivating women, than elsewhere. They were imbued with platonic
sweetness, had acquired an indescribable magnetism, a perfume of human
graciousness, so holy, so all-pervading that it seemed to purify the air
and make the world a temple instead of a hospital: like the precious
spikenard poured long ago upon the feet of the Saviour, all soiled with
the dust of the world.
Like all other arts, charm is a gift of nature. The first rule for a
woman is to know herself thoroughly, so that she may bring her individual
gifts discreetly into play, especially those which affect the man she has
in view. It will not do to let her art appear. A woman’s charm depends
upon her acting spontaneously, even though imperfectly; it is impossible
to insist too strongly on this principle, which of itself explains the
evolution of women’s power in the sixteenth century. So long as women
frankly assert their personality in their actions, taking counsel only
of themselves, their power never ceases to grow, and produces excellent
results; but when, whether from indifference, timidity, the instinct of
submission, or a mistaken education, they no longer see in platonism
anything but an art to learn, a lesson to rattle off, a conventional
pose, all is over; men of real virility escape their influence, and
deride their charm as a puerile thing, and the women find no men to
govern but the insignificant herd whom they do not care a straw for,
and who are distinguished one from another only by the colour of their
pantaloons. This is the practical result of the parallel instituted
between true platonism and the platonism of convention, between
Michelangelo and Bembo, between the vigorous Anne of France, who was
willing to assimilate certain delightful principles of the new spirit so
long as no sacrifice of character or caste was involved, and the amiable
Margaret of France, who was much more inclined to go over bag and baggage
to the Italian methods, in order to obtain in France the same results as
in Italy.
Nevertheless, apart from originality, which is indispensable, and
diversity, which is essential, it is possible to mention some elements
that go to the making of charm, consecrated, apparently, by experience
or tradition. Of these, some are physical, some intellectual; for the
present we shall speak only of the former.
It is a general rule (if we may speak of rules) that the physical charm
of a woman springs entirely from whatever accentuates her feminine,
arch-feminine character. Thus it must above all express the completest,
most absolute sweetness.
For a long time this characteristic sweetness appeared to spring from
gracefulness of form and feature: a face of aristocratic oval; a swan
neck, a wasp waist; in short a general effect of reed-like slightness
and fragility, a veritable mantel ornament, so delicately balanced that
to touch it was more than one dared, and that one was puzzled how so
frail a thing had ever managed to stand on such tiny feet, to hold out
such a poor little hand—a virginal figure of fifteen years.[171] This
wonderfully pure ideal persisted in Spain; but in Italy one of the
first signs of decadence was the preference for more sensual forms.
The Florentines, with their fastidious ideal of elegance, were almost
alone in resisting the current; good Firenzuola did not yield to it to
any extent, and at most there was at Florence a small section in favour
of muscle and robustness, of whom Michelangelo is the representative.
But at Venice, a fine opulence of flesh, luminous and warm, wonderfully
substantial and soft, “full of a delicious comfortableness,” carried all
before it—a beauty such as the pagans have celebrated in their lyrics and
such as the East adores: nothing seemed more charming.
In France, the national spirit, always eclectic and vacillating, was
neither idealistic nor materialistic enough to take any side in this
dispute.
Autant me plaist la grassette,
Comme me plaist la maigrette.[172]
—_Ronsard._
The great goddesses who ruled and dominated the classical epoch, Madame
de Chateaubriand, Madame de Canaples,[173] Diana of Poitiers, were
representatives of vigorous stocks; an old lusty blood coursed visibly
enough through their veins; but they mastered it as they mastered
everything, diluting it with an effeminacy which had, however, a charm of
its own.
The colour of the hair and eyebrows always appeared a characteristic
factor in a woman’s expression; without fair hair there was no charm.
According to a twelfth-century chronicler, the sweet Saint Godeliva
of Bruges was called a “horrid crow” by her hag of a stepmother on
account of her dusky hair; it was to her hair indeed that she owed
the tribulations that won for her the aureole of sainthood. In all
probability the dukes of Burgundy, when they created the order of the
Golden Fleece, were thinking rather of the charming women with heads like
a golden harvest-field than of the exploits of Jason. It is impossible to
imagine Botticelli crowning Spring with black, or Raphael representing
his Virgins as goddesses of night. The blonde had it all her own way.
And yet even in this matter the fastidious Florentines did not commit
themselves, and had something to say for the pretty dainty little dark
heads that were to be met in the fields of Umbria. In France the chestnut
locks which set off so many charming faces were greatly admired.
But there was absolute unanimity in favour of a soft complexion of
creamy white. All men, whatever their nationality, whether idealists
or not—poets and aesthetes, dandies, elegant or melancholy men, as
Firenzuola and Tibaldeo[174] called themselves—united in praise of the
charm and sweetness of the lily and the rose.
As for the eyes, they are the very fount of charm; by their aid heart is
linked with heart in exquisite communings, in them the soul ranges the
whole compass of its utterance. The Italians were particularly fond of
speaking eyes, black, velvety, dreamy or deep; the French, while by no
means insensible to the charm of languorous Creole eyes, much preferred
eyes full of animation and intelligence, and these were usually of a
light grey or brownish colour. On one point they were almost unanimous: a
French girl of piquant expression and mobile features, all sparkle from
eyes to lips, was the top of admiration.
Such are the few summary and exceedingly vague notions of charm, from the
physical point of view, to which women could look for inspiration.
They could choose among these various characteristics, or they could at
least go some way towards them. There is no mystic virtue in the advice;
the important thing is to succeed; but if a woman lacks any one of the
recognised instruments of charm, it is better to look for another than to
attempt the impossible. Women have been known to delight men merely by
the beauty of a wide intellectual brow: Mademoiselle de Vieilleville’s
charm lay in a sweet little lisp, and the fair Chanteloup’s in her
delicious little mouth. A pretty pout, a little wanton laugh, lips fine
and so red that a man asks himself “which is the cherry and which is the
mouth?” the carriage of the body, the play of the features—all these and
many other things may become the “fount of amorous sweets.” All that is
necessary is that in one way or another a woman should enwrap herself
with her sweetness, as with a goddess’s veil.
Leonardo da Vinci sometimes painted good housewives, frank and precise in
countenance, but he took no pleasure in them; he hardly regarded them as
women: a bold look, he said, only suits women who are no longer women.
Whenever he was in love with his model he has given her a modest port,
one arm shielding her breast, and he has half submerged her in a kind
of penumbra. In France a trim, sprightly, noticeably handsome woman was
obliged to disguise herself in an air of languorous affability. The most
stony-hearted of Frenchmen surrendered to “a sweet and gentle face,” “a
sweet look, a sweet bearing, a sweet countenance.”
Another quality which idealists regarded as conducive to charm was a
certain stiffness and reserve of manner. Woman, like the ark of the
covenant, was to be worthy of all respect. She was not thought the worse
of if, like a mimosa, she shrank within herself when the sun’s rays were
no longer there to warm her, and if she was afraid of the dark. The woman
chary of her smile was considered a delightful creature. In platonist
circles they would scarcely even admire the beauty of the shoulders, and
indeed there were no longer seen flaunted in the streets or churches,
under the eyes of the common herd, certain liberties in costume, from
time immemorial the despair of preachers—low-cut dresses, like that of
good Isabel of Bavaria, whom the monk Jacques Legrant admonished from
the pulpit for showing everything “down to her navel”: robes scalloped
at the sides; long-pointed shoes so much in the way that a woman had to
lift her petticoats very high to be able to walk. Castiglione goes into
raptures about the simple little velvet boot of a lady who, on going
to mass one morning, fancied she had to spring lightly across a brook.
Aretino, naturally an expert in such a matter, declares that no one has
a greater horror of a gratuitous display of her charms than a courtesan!
Refinement and delicacy seemed to make women more fastidious and more
shy, because they realised their value, and because they wished to be
loved, principally at least, for their soul. And then great ladies, like
everyone else, come in time to the verge of forty, and their taste and
discretion are remarkable. Persuaded that perfection is always rare in
this poor world, they appreciate the importance of a good appearance,
especially in a blasé society, and they are not unaware how much they owe
to the skill of the dressmaker.
Here, however, there arises a question on which a few words must be said,
for it not only occupies a certain place in the history of art, but it
commonly leads to what appears to us a not very correct estimate of the
aesthetic rôle of the women of the Renaissance: the mistake has perhaps
been made of not treating it as seriously as it deserves.
It is well known that the sixteenth century displayed an immoderate fancy
for Venuses, delighting in them, going into ecstasies over them, setting
them here, there and everywhere with a sort of intoxication,—like a man
issuing from a too long seclusion into fresh air.
It must indeed be confessed that the grave, austere art of the Middle
Ages had erred a little in the opposite direction. The influence of
asceticism had generated the absurdly exaggerated desire to put out
of sight the existence of matter; artists attenuated corporeal forms
until on their canvases the body represented merely a thought; and the
raiment, consequently, in which the body was delicately and gracefully
draped, served as vesture to this thought, and contributed, so to speak,
to immaterialise it. The influence of Greek art was needed to effect a
reversion and to set upon physical beauty the stamp of a living art.
The platonist aesthetics contributed in large measure to strengthen this
movement, since it brought into favour the theory that the human body
is the perfect type of terrestrial beauty, just as the human soul is
the queen of the universe. Thanks to Plato, man, full of wit and love
and liberty, appeared in his single self more intelligent, more free,
more worthy of worship than all the rest of nature; and as the Bible
reveals him also as the image of God, it seemed right to pay him honour.
It cannot then be said, even on this matter, that to break with the
aesthetic traditions of the Middle Ages necessarily involved breaking
with their traditions in psychology and morals; platonism believed it
was merely developing and amplifying Christian art, gaining for it all
the superb expansion of which it was capable; and consequently, in the
early days, it was often with perfect good faith and highly spiritual
intentions that artists deified the vital forces of the world in the
nude. Michelangelo is there to prove to us that it was possible to
glorify the human figure fearlessly and unblushingly without weakening
in any way the general conception of vigour and chastity. Whether he
paints men or women, the result is the same: in bringing his wrestlers
upon the scene he seems to fling at them this old apostrophe of a mystic:
“I love you, not because of your fine garments, but because you have
suffered much.” Who would ever say that his Eve in the Sistine chapel
is yielding, through any languor whatever, to the suggestions of the
serpent! This woman of his has assuredly strength enough to withstand a
serpent unaided! She goes resolutely to meet the knowledge of good and
evil, with the perfect freedom of an accomplished athlete, with more
determination than curiosity, because she feels that her body is capable
of every endurance; and besides, no one has yet told her that children
are brought forth in anguish. Michelangelo has clothed with purity even
the lamentable mother of mankind!
And assuredly when an artist of the same school pushes the audacity of
realism so far as to stretch openly on the royal tomb in the cathedral
of St. Denis nude effigies of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, of Henri
II. and Catherine de’ Medici, he is giving a lesson in morality, lofty,
stern, admirable, and of splendid eloquence.
From this standpoint, the sight of the human form appeared absolutely
conformable to aesthetics and philosophy, so much so that a whole
generation of well-intentioned tutors, at whom Ulrich von Hütten pokes
a little fun, set themselves ingeniously to explain to young people the
religious significance of nudities. It was on the same principle that
François de Moulins, the excellent cleric specially entrusted with the
moral instruction of young Francis I., inserted in his manuscripts a
picture of the Graces, and taught his young pupil that Charity is rightly
represented as a nude figure, in order to symbolise her generosity, or
rather to bring it more vividly home to one.
It is hardly necessary to add that if the spiritualistic and platonist
school derived these noble effects from the new aesthetic idea, there was
another school of artists and amateurs, much more numerous, which saw
in the exhibitions of the academies only an entertainment of a wholly
different order. We cannot know (and we do not ask) what was Dürer’s
secret feeling when he thought, as even he did, to imitate Michelangelo;
but what can be affirmed is that he is not altogether successful; he
cannot get away from domesticity; the good ladies he presents to us have
nothing superhuman about them; far from it, they are women just escaped
from their shop-counters (and their corsets!), or very matter-of-fact
bathers, or a statuesque “Fortune,” who, despite her broad wings, yet
appears ill at ease in what Montaigne calls her “animal’s costume.” The
Italian artists, except for a few of the early ones, have not in similar
cases allowed a like embarrassment to appear. By their own account, they
moved with the greatest ease among these physical beauties, like perfect
aesthetes. Undoubtedly many of them believed men, and more especially
women, to be the loveliest of created things, and in fact they display
them to us everywhere, with striking ability. Salons, public resorts,
promenades, even the walls of churches and cathedrals in those days
looked more or less like a pseudo-paradise. The triumph of the flesh was
pealed forth with a brave clarion call. And we must not forget that this
sort of painting formed a capital trade, which brought in both money and
honour.
By degrees, however, this licence evoked murmurings, which grew stronger
day by day, and as Michelangelo more than anyone else had ennobled
the practice, by inscribing above the private altar of the popes the
sublimest and most terrible page of philosophy ever written by painter’s
brush, he was specially marked out for attack. Undoubtedly he was
generally recognised as the responsible enunciator of this new principle
of art, and it is a clear proof of the general and almost unopposed
onslaught on him that the man most keenly alive to the drift of fashion,
Aretino, ventured to indulge in virulent invective against him upon this
subject. After the Council of Trent, a veritable crusade was organised
with the noble end of purging the churches of too lifelike anatomies. It
is the correct thing, in the _Joanne_,[175] to make merry at the expense
of Pope Paul IV., dubbed by facetious and satirical people with the
humiliating sobriquet of the “breeches maker,” because he caused some
veracious but really unessential details in the work of Michelangelo to
be timidly covered with gauze, and because he generously presented the
Holy Virgin with the dress she badly wanted. At the risk of incurring the
same reproaches and of becoming a by-word to guide-books past, present,
and future, we shall here confess that it seems difficult to blame him.
The _Last Judgment_, though absolutely pure in intention, became for
the popes quite a stumbling-block from the moment they entered upon the
highly legitimate crusade of artistic purification; when in 1573 Veronese
was reproached for introducing into _Last Suppers_ details little tending
to edification, he did not fail to plead the example of the Sistine
chapel. There is not a doubt but that Calvin would have shown himself
much more rigorous than Paul IV.
This fascination for the symphonic harmonies of the body was not only
an anxiety to the popes; it distressed also the noble women who wished
to constitute themselves directors of the aesthetic movement, or rather
to become the very incarnation of beauty and love. How far these women,
possessed by the desire of securing the triumph of intellectual beauty,
found themselves compelled to make certain concessions, is a knotty
question to which, as it seems to us, people have as a rule furnished
somewhat too liberal answers. So far as the men were concerned, there is
no possible doubt about their materialistic tastes; we have, in a by no
means small number of records and anecdotes, not to speak of legends,
excellent evidence of their partiality for lifelike representations; they
demanded them, insisted on having them. To satisfy them, art set itself
to picture the unclothed; it is plain that the platonist women had no
option but to rise in revolt. But there exist some Venuses, sculptured
or painted, to which the artist undoubtedly intended to give the spicy
attractiveness of portraits. The figures show realistic touches,
sometimes positive deformities; there are hump-backed Venuses, emaciated
Venuses, Venuses of mountainous bulk. They invariably wear beautiful
jewellery, a necklace, for example, and have their little dog beside
them. A characteristic detail is that their hair has been the object of
the most sedulous painstaking; it is a masterly scaffolding of crimped
and waved and curled locks, interspersed with jewels in such a way as
to make quite clear that this is no shy woodland nymph, but a woman of
fashion, a woman of wealth, and even, as far as that can be shown, of
birth and breeding. This class of figure is admirably represented on
certain of Titian’s canvases, and it is an almost immemorial tradition
to take them as the painter seems to intend, namely, as portraits of
distinguished women.
Are we to believe that the religion of beauty, in purifying all things,
led women to adopt so extreme a custom? We do not believe it.
That would have been the total failure of all their tactics, and on this
point Plato was beaten out and out. Even in that coterie at Urbino where
to cultivate the purest platonism was the delightful occupation of life,
there was a general smile when one of the company, smiling discreetly
himself, reminded them of the Master’s recommendation that young girls
should practise gymnastics in a costume of primitive simplicity. Ladies
were not at all enamoured of a troglodytic beauty, and anyone who fancied
that the contemplation of Michelangelo’s or Signorelli’s, works would
turn their heads would have been greatly mistaken. Julian de’ Medici,
on being bantered by his friends about the way he kept his fair lady
out of sight, humorously replies: “Madam, if I thought her beautiful
I would show her without her finery, as Paris insisted on seeing the
Three Goddesses; but in that case she would need to be attired by those
divinities themselves; and since ’tis thought she is pretty, I prefer to
take care of her.”[176]
Platonist women felt extreme repugnance for anything resembling publicity
or vulgarisation—anything likely to come under the common gaze. One day,
at a ball, a young girl seemed a prey to a gloomy pre-occupation from
which nothing could rouse her, and her friends wore themselves out in
vainly conjecturing the reason. At last they got the key to the mystery:
“I was pondering,” she said, “a notion which haunts and worries me, and I
cannot rid my heart of it. All our bodies have to rise at Judgment Day,
and stand naked before the judgment seat of God, and I cannot bear the
distress I feel at the thought that I too must appear stark naked.”[177]
It cannot be denied, of course, that there exists a certain number of
Olympian portraits. But these have nothing to do with platonism, and
further, many of them were executed without assistance from the model.
When a fashionable woman was having her portrait painted, she did not
pretend to patience, and would not sit. Proof enough, surely! The
artist had to dash off a hurried sketch with the speed of a present-day
photographer; the portrait was afterwards worked up from this sketch in
the studio, and a succession of replicas was made from it. It is obvious
that, getting possession of fashionable ladies’ heads in this way, the
artists had every opportunity of making an ill use of them, and supplying
them with a costume not bargained for.
Nowadays the fun would strike us as in rather doubtful taste; but women
were in those days so good-natured and quick-witted that they were the
very first to laugh at a sorry jest of this kind, especially if their
personal rank placed them above suspicion, and still more if the portrait
was pretty and flattering.
The poet Michel d’Amboise relates how he gallantly offered the lady
he idolised a portrait of herself as Venus. The fair damsel looked at
the object with not a little pleasure; but as it was necessary for the
sake of principle to reprimand the painter, she asked him where he had
managed to see her in this unusual guise. He replied, like a genuine
courtier:
J’ay ta façon sceue par celuy
Qui est à toy trop plus qu’il n’est à luy.[178]
“Indeed!” she cried. “But he has never seen me either.”
We owe to Ronsard, to whom it was an every-day affair to be in love, a
description of the lover’s method. He goes to Janet Clouet,[179] and
requests a portrait of his lady-love with every possible charm. Actually
he has seen no more of her than the graceful oval of her face and her
lithe swan-neck, but that does not prevent his describing the rest of
her, and bespeaking for the portrait, with the fullest confidence, the
most ravishing details. Clouet sets to work there and then on a very
charming portrait, which will perhaps not be a very striking likeness
after all.
In such a case (from a sentiment that sufficiently explains itself),
when the desire was to do homage in some way to the presumptive beauty
of some particular lady, the most elementary idea of discretion prompted
the artist to idealise her features a little, with the result that,
the features being all there is to guide us, we may say that pictures
of this kind are not, strictly speaking, portraits; they are ideas,
_arrière-pensées_, illusions more or less transparent. If tradition
could be trusted, how many portraits should we have, for instance, of
Diana of Poitiers? That noble lady herself commissioned a fair number of
Dianas, which may pass for symbols, for the glorification of her name and
work. But, without speaking of likenesses that are more than doubtful,
among all those which M. Guiffrey has so ably catalogued, even those
signed by the most illustrious names, we do not find one that is really
a likeness. This defect might be pardoned in the enamels, even those
signed by Leonard Limosin,[180] but what excuse can be made for Jean
Goujon?[181] Look for instance at the superb Diana in the Louvre: done
for Anet, it triumphantly challenged all heaven to surpass this human
beauty, synthetised in one vigorous woman, one true divinity, monumental,
imposing, of commanding port between her deer and her hounds, in no wise
voluptuous—a remote cousin of Michelangelo’s Eve, though degraded to rule
over forests and dogs and men. Clearly it was the châtelaine’s own wish
to glorify her creed, her ideal, her patroness; Jean Goujon has deified
her, sung her praises, interpreted her; and yet we have no difficulty in
recognising, from certain realistic touches, how careful he is to remind
us that he was celebrating a terrestrial divinity. Is this a portrait?
No. It is enough to compare this statue with the authentic likeness of
Diana of Poitiers on medallions. If Jean Goujon has suggested anything of
the duchess’s beauty in the head, it is with a restraint well calculated
to baffle us.
Besides the portraits on canvas or in marble there were also others,
pen portraits, which were all the rage; and indeed in after years we
find painters complaining of the competition thus set up against them by
writers. Though portraits of this kind were necessarily less agitating,
people amused themselves by seeking physical details in them; it was
a feast for fine wits to “blazon,” as they said, this or that part of
the body, and it may be that certain _blasons_[182] were less anonymous
than they seem. This special art has given us one celebrated portrait
which has not ceased to pique the curiosity and stimulate the sagacity
of critics. The philosopher Nifo, a welcome guest in the house of the
young Jeanne of Aragon, where he justified his presence by platonically
courting one of the ladies-in-waiting, wished to offer the princess,
with the orthodox dedication, a concise treatise on the Beautiful, and,
to give his folio a certain piquancy, he inserted in it a portrait,
complete, circumstantial, ruthless, a study in pathology and anatomy,
of all the endowments visible and invisible of the young lady to whom
the book was dedicated. In accepting the dedication, the princess
took upon her shoulders the responsibility for the work. How could she
approve of this dedication?—a remarkable problem which commentators have
endeavoured to solve in every way but the right one. To us, at any rate,
the explanation is very simple.
All the critics have set out with the idea that Nifo was rashly
indiscreet—a position difficult enough to defend, since a liberty
officially sanctioned is one no longer, and, if fault it was, there
is no trace of absolution. Now what was this alleged impudent fellow?
A fortunate and braggart lover, say some. Can we conceive this old
simpleton, forsooth, hideous, gouty, a mountain of flesh, a trifle
ridiculous—who was overjoyed at courting a waiting-maid (who laughed
in her sleeve at him)—boasting thus publicly of a conquest over the
impeccable virtue of a young girl of eighteen, the pearl of Italy! That
would have been no occasion for self-glorification: if the conquest had
been really his, the book would have appeared without dedication.
Bayle has offered another explanation, still more amusing: he has simply
translated by “médecin” Nifo’s honorary appellation of “Medici,” and
founding on this little slip of his, he takes occasion to thunder against
physicians who abuse the confidence of their fair clients. Even so, there
would still have been no liberty! Besides, Nifo was not a physician, and
even if he had been, he would not have found himself much further on; for
ladies, as we have shown, had no belief in the neuter sex of the experts
who tended them, and were wonderfully ready to regard them as veterinary
surgeons rather than philosophers. They always drew a distinction between
the nude and the unclothed! Nifo simply ventured on the same pleasantry
as Michel d’Amboise and Ronsard and all the second-rate idealists, ready
to pay intellectual adoration to a woman, and yet susceptible to her
physical charms—if only like a fish on a baited hook. He ascribes to
his platonic princess, but in an aesthetic and abstract sense, a beauty
well calculated to increase the number of her courtiers and shed lustre
upon her philosophical activity; he acts like a good lieutenant and
henchman, rendering her a philosophical service of which she cannot but
show herself sensible. Those who have the patience to read Nifo will
find later in his book an explicit corrective, the strict necessity of
which, however, is by no means obvious. In another chapter, to remove
all misapprehension, he enlarges with fervour on the moral virtues of
Jeanne of Aragon, putting in the forefront the two which seem to him the
most salient—the beauty which attracts, enflames, enraptures, elevates
men; the modesty which serves her as breastplate and armour: “In these
two points,” he cries, “you eclipse all other women!” Poor Nifo! Even of
Phausina Rhea, the waiting-maid to whom he declared his love without any
beating about the bush, he knew nothing but her chignon! And it was just
this perfect, if a little vexatious, security that gave such a zest to
his pleasantry about the princess.
In the seventeenth century also, a century of masculine predominance,
people fancied they were deifying men, and especially princes, by
representing them nude. La Bruyère was compelled to laugh when at a
street corner he contemplated the head of the state, the grave Louis
XIV., posed as a stone Apollo. The idea may be as ridiculous as you
please, but who would ever dream of being disturbed at the sight? Did La
Bruyère himself imagine for a single moment that Louis XIV. had taken the
trouble to leave an authentic torso to posterity?
Margaret of France, however, who was all soul, had a singular idea in
regard to this subject. She was patently shocked at the mere thought that
anyone could say he had admired some Italian princess or duchess lying in
the most voluptuous simplicity in the midst of a beautiful landscape, set
off by drapery that only half covers her. To this fascinating, but as she
thought degrading, spectacle she resolved to oppose another—the spectacle
of the soul. The project occurred to her, it is true, at an age when all
her charms but those of the soul were dead; she had herself painted,
therefore, like the others, before a landscape on which the sun is rising
(or setting), and in front of a curtain; but instead of lying at length,
she stands erect. She is clothed in her shift, transparent enough indeed,
but carefully fastened about the neck, and, to give greater point to
the interpretation, she is admiring herself in a little hand-glass, in
allusion no doubt to her book _The Mirror of the Soul_. She wears neither
necklace nor jewels; a few ordinary trinkets negligently placed on her
toilet-table alone indicate her quality. Her whole body in its tender
austerity is a revelation of her soul. And the moral effect of this
representation appeared so lofty that this little portrait was treasured
in the princess’s family as her true likeness, the portrait at once
authentic and piously esoteric.[183] Margaret thus drew from art its
ethical teaching, and gave a lesson to ladies who rely too much on mere
beauty of form.
Such is, we believe, the key to the enigma. To win their triumph
platonist women do not fling away their weapons, as someone has wittily
said; they lay them by.
On the other hand, in the second half of the century, when platonism had
disappeared along with feminism, the scruples of the women underwent
considerable modification. A compromise was effected; the body was,
so to speak, cut in two. The lower part remained inferior, but the
upper, the bust namely, was regarded as superior and of a beauty that
might fitly be exhibited. At the end of the century we have portraits
of great ladies conforming to this new fashion. Perhaps also, out of a
spirit of mischief, people amused themselves by distributing under this
form portraits of ladies who enjoyed almost a public reputation for
beauty, such as Gabrielle d’Estrées and her sister. The more masculine
society becomes, the more do women become fleshly. And we should only
have to point out another instance of this phenomenon if we were not
convinced that the fashion of which we speak sprang up in an atmosphere
of semi-platonism. Diana of Poitiers, apparently, was delighted to
exhibit her bust, and indeed it is this peculiarity which led M. Vitet
to believe that he recognised her in a family portrait of Henri II., at
present in England, which includes all the royal family, namely, Henri
II., Catherine, his official wife, Diana, spouse of his heart, and his
children. We have not had the opportunity of seeing this portrait, and
consequently cannot verify M. Vitet’s conjecture. But we think we have
sufficiently proved that, even from the purely aesthetic standpoint, the
platonist ladies did not depart from the practical principles of conduct
they deemed the best and most profitable; the solitary example of Diana
of Poitiers, who cannot be cited as a thorough platonist, does not strike
us as sufficient to prove the contrary.
It is true that sometimes the ladies had to yield to the exigencies of
their time, and tolerate, on the part of the men about them, customs and
a style of talk in which they could take no pleasure. They had to do so
or risk being neglected and causing often worse evils.
The intimacies of family life sanctioned in those days truly astonishing
liberties. Thus, on the morning of Innocents’ Day in December, a man
would consider himself entitled to surprise in her bed a lady of the
family, or a woman of the household (generally a young woman), and to
administer a slap with the open hand, which was called “giving the
innocents.”[184]
In one of the stories of the _Heptameron_,[185] a husband gravely
announces to his wife “that he means to go at daybreak and give the
innocents to her waiting-maid, to teach her not to be so lazy,” and the
good lady is blissfully unsuspicious.
In vain did the women most liable to such treatment have recourse to all
sorts of subterfuges—sleeping elsewhere that night, or rising at dawn;
escape was almost impossible. Margaret of France knew all about it; for
all her demureness, Clément Marot wrote a scrap of verse expressly to
threaten “to give her the innocents” and “see that comely body.” Her
nephew Charles of Orleans made merry at her expense because, “having
risen too late” on Innocents’ Day, he impudently made up for it next day
with his poor aunt and another lady: “I won’t tell you just now,” he
wrote, “all that I saw.” His letter tells a good deal as it is. It is
not surprising that a princess habituated to such buffooneries strove at
least to raise their level a little.
As there was no help for it but to exercise their charm on man the
brute by such proceedings, the women displayed neither pedantry nor
affectation. Besides, if the sensualists thought only of the body, women
thought only of the soul; and here, under a new form, we again trace the
idea that in giving heart and mind and soul to the man of her choice
a woman had really given him all that was dearest, most precious to
her, all that constituted her personality, and that the rest had only a
secondary importance. She had lent her material person to a husband who
had not troubled himself about fathoming her soul: why then should she
think of refusing favours of no consequence to the man who had really
gathered the early blossom of that soul? Just as the most trifling
familiarity disgusted her when it sprang from a vulgar material motive or
was forced, so the greatest seemed to her legitimate and even pleasant
if it was spontaneous, if it consecrated a genuine affection. The lady
who, while taking her bath, would have thought it more seemly to dismiss
her maid, did not fear to receive there in all honour a visit from a
gentleman.
Why should distinguished ladies have deprived themselves, at the levee
they held on rising and retiring, of the pleasure of an intimate bedside
conversation with their lover? In their eyes it had exquisite advantages:
first, the very intimacy of the conversation; then the intellectual and
emotional relish it imparted to the purely physical operations of the
toilet; finally, for the favoured visitor, there was the tiny reward of
platonic love, the little personal token, the special bond which no one
else had. Margaret of France tells us explicitly that she could not have
insulted a man of position and a friend of the king, like Bonnivet, by
excluding him from her “dressing and undressing”; that, further, there
was no harm in Bonnivet’s “taking this opportunity to increase his
affection,”[186] seeing that platonic love consists precisely in loving
up to the very verge of the forbidden.
In short, women genuinely platonic used their physical beauty as a
first means of developing their charm. In this respect they were at
odds with the mystics, who regarded the body as a negligible quantity
and an encumbrance; but they were still more sharply divided from the
sensualists. Their idea was to deify the body, enshrine it, so to speak,
and glorify it as the vesture of the soul, the servant of the heart.
Platonists of a lofty flight pushed this idea as far as possible:
Michelangelo so closely identified soul and body as not even to admit
that the face could have wrinkles when the soul had none; so great was
his enthusiasm for the beauty and youthfulness of Vittoria Colonna’s
soul, that he had that strange artist fancy never to perceive a line
on her face. He himself, when a scarred and battered octogenarian,
never felt withered; to his last day he never ceased to ascend with
shining countenance the altar of the Beautiful, like those priests who
bow hoary heads before the altar of the Eternal Beauty, the Eternal
Sacrifice, as they invoke “the God who rejoiced their youth.” He has
sometimes been twitted with having represented the Virgin as a woman
of thirty, even after the death of Christ; he did so, it is true, and
to him nothing appeared more natural. To him such a woman was always
thirty. On this point Anne of France did not quite agree with him; it
was one of her favourite maxims that a woman had much better accept
the inevitable with a stout heart; conceal nothing, dress to suit her
age, and persuade herself that wisdom is worth as much as beauty. But
Margaret of France could not bring herself to believe that a few marks
of physical deterioration dim the radiance of a woman’s moral beauty or
impair her charm. That such is not the case was the assured conviction
of these noble princesses. Unhappily it was not easy to persuade men
so. La Rochefoucauld retorts: “There are few women whose worth survives
their beauty.” To men a woman no longer exists if she can say: “When I
was younger”; every possible defect is then laid to her charge; she is
found to be ugly, jealous, washed out, viperous. Wisdom may be worth as
much as beauty, but what can she do with her wisdom? In Italy a woman was
reckoned to have reached the wisdom stage at thirty, and Anne of France
only consented as a great favour to allow her another ten years.
Apart from any sort of notion of coquetry, it was therefore of the
greatest importance to a woman, from a mere sentiment of her duty and
her mission, never to be forty; the theory of charm would not have been
complete without the addition of the science of never growing old.
This accessory science was, so to speak, a traced copy of that of love;
it also had its two schools: the school of truth and candour, the
“honest skill” which consists in keeping old age at bay; and the school
of cleverness and subtlety, which seeks to recover the lost youth, to
employ a little trickery, to repair time’s ravages—“a perpetual optical
illusion,” as Erasmus calls it.
The first demanded much forethought and prudence. From the earliest years
of wedlock, with no immediate cause for alarm, it was an unremitting
mortal struggle against a foe as yet imaginary. The wife found her
weapons in solemn tomes and in the prescriptions she herself had
collected. A firm opposition to her husband formed part of her scheme. As
to special modes of treatment, they comprised aromatic baths, massage,
and so forth, means which were very restrictive and mundane and tiresome,
but wonderfully effective.
A lady of that period could write in all pride and truthfulness, “Women
remain almost always young.” There were some who, when close upon
seventy, still merited the good opinion of connoisseurs.
Others allowed themselves to be lulled asleep in the joy of youth, and
only awoke under the stroke of some sharp warning; but then they sprang
erect to their full height like a wounded tiger, and there was no act of
unquenchable courage they did not accomplish. They had their teeth drawn,
their skin scraped till it bled, they reduced their colour by dint of
gulping down sand or cinders. They were heroines of unselfishness!
But if, alas! decay proved in the end irresistible, and they had to
resort to sham, how disastrous was the result! Around a made-up face
ill-natured folk saw nothing but shams—sham tapestry, sham bronzes, sham
conversation; art and platonism alike were banished:
Ostez luy le fard et le vice,
Vous luy ostez l’âme et le corps.[187]
—_Ronsard._
The dressing-room became like a universal factory of pinchbeck. On the
door might have been written the dictum, in general so utterly false,
of Cennino Cennini:[188] “Art consists in creating, or at least in
persuading men that that which is not, is.” Let us drop the subject.
It is evident, on the contrary, that the honest art of dressing played
an important part in practical platonism, so long as it was not carried
too far.
Since women were messengers of joy to the world, it followed that this
mission must be declared by outward signs. What more natural than to
give a princess a magnificent trousseau! It was not a luxury, it was the
implement of her profession. Anne of France was sure that simplicity had
been formerly pushed too far: everyone, she said, ought to maintain his
rank and perform his duty in it; the world has a right to what belongs
to it, that is, to everything save a woman’s heart: to neglect to study
appearances, to cultivate false simplicity, is to commit an “unseemly and
most dishonest” act. To dress must be considered a duty.
A simple little “mirror of the soul,” like that of Margaret of France,
was not sufficient for an apostle of beauty. Mirrors of every kind and
style, hollow or pyramidal like factory chimneys, circular, angular, in
columns or spirals, rightly absorbed her attention every morning and gave
her a philosophical and serious conception of her person. It is not at
all to be wondered at that the lady whose appearance was to thrill the
world should begin by setting all this machinery in motion.
The care of the complexion, and especially of the hands, naturally took
some time to begin with, not to speak of hygienic attentions. A delicate
little touch with the brush on the face is quickly given, but it demands
wonderful skill: it is nothing, and it is all.
But the hair required an exemplary patience. Remember what we have said
about the infallible charm of light hair. At Venice Veronese never met
a brunette! When a brunette was mentioned everybody understood that
she was a woman who had given up dyeing and all pretensions to beauty!
That is why the Roman ladies, whom Tertullian reproached with flaunting
“barbarous colours,” and why our modern artists in hair-dressing, have
never discovered any more beautifully effective recipes for golden
tresses than those furnished by Marinello[189] or Cennini to many a
convinced devotee of platonism. The Venetian blonde, with her beautiful,
glossy, golden-brown locks, enjoys even to-day a renown so much the more
legitimate in that Nature has never succeeded in imitating her.—When the
hair had received its golden hue, it was spread at length in the sunlight
to dry, and then began the real operation of the day—the grand masterly
operation of hair-dressing.
In France, singular customs in regard to this matter had long prevailed.
A lady would run a comb through her hair, probably quite perfunctorily,
slip on a hood, which she would keep on the whole day, and trip off to
Mass. This was still common as late as Anne of Brittany’s time: that good
queen herself was faithful to the hood to her dying day.
By Heaven’s favour, Mary of England brought Louis XII. beautiful fair
locks, quite genuine too, and the fashion of wearing hats. Then, despite
the invectives of a few insignificant people like the poet Coquillart,
the feminine head-dress attained altitudes more and more complicated:
crimpings came in, and curling irons, paddings of false hair, huge coils
stuck with jewels in the Italian fashion. The quest of intellectual charm
displayed itself in some ladies by an artificial broadening of the brow;
to become philosophic, it sufficed slightly to shave off the hair in
front and pile it up high behind. The hair-dressers, who had now become
men of substance and repute, lengthened their showcases, and invented
those charming wooden heads which we have not ceased to admire.
That the hair-dressing operation lasted three hours need not surprise us;
but how mortally tedious these hours would have appeared without the help
of conversation! The fair patient settled herself accordingly, garbed
in a chemisette of fine linen, cut pretty low at the neck and in no way
impeding her movements; and that was the hour when she showed her heart
to her friends.
She had then only to dress herself, that is, to put on a wide-sleeved
cloak of damask, with a very low, square-shaped opening in which the
waiting-women slipped a plastron, usually red; this they laced with care
so as to fit the figure exactly; if necessary they inserted an artificial
bust, and remorselessly tightened the waist.
In the great old-world houses, the last of these evolutions was
superintended by the master of the robes in person. Saluting with a low
bow, he announced the costume for the day. The serving maids, aided by
the squires, busied themselves about the lady, and packed her into a
doughty accoutrement of crimson and cloth of gold, a sort of clumsy
casing, a veritable strait-jacket, treacherously supported since the
close of the fifteenth century by busks or whale-bones, the furtive
origin of the corset. Around her neck was thrown a necklace of gold,
rubies, emeralds or diamonds, and on her head was set a sort of tiara.
Not one of these details is unimportant, since the whole performance had
a lofty aim. And this is just the opportunity we have been waiting for
to judge the women; or rather, their dress passes judgment upon them.
Will they, we ask, have the courage to make their clothing expressive of
their own individuality, to render their garments in some sort living
and personal, or will they, with mere vulgar coquetry, copy and wear the
costume that may be seen trailing in any street? The courage to indulge
an individual taste in dress seemed a thing of no consequence; it is,
really, a great and a rare virtue; it stamps a woman at once, shows
if she has a soul above her tailor, if she has self-knowledge, if she
reflects, if she has a feeling for art, if she is determined to show the
world her own intelligence, her own beauty. Hands all round for liberty
and truth! Anne of France and many others rebelled against the craze
for a slim figure, stifling in summer, freezing in winter, regardless
of the claims of physical health, and even seeking to conceal the signs
of motherhood. How they wished that aestheticism would lead them back
to the Greek art, that is to say, to wide flowing garments, dignified,
comfortable, healthy, elegant! Or, as Louise Labé[190] poetically
besought, that women, instead of fastening themselves in a strait-jacket,
would condescend to resemble a leaf-cone, which opens spontaneously to
bear its fruit! But no; the only approach they made to Greek art was that
they sought to indicate the lines of the figure through close-fitting
casings, but the casings were whalebone and artificial. Health, even life
itself, was of no account; to graces which, however imperfect, had all
the attractions of naturalness they preferred a stuffed and padded ideal.
For alas! with the majority of women, a dialogue of Plato could not hold
a candle to a conversation with a dressmaker. Fashion was omnipotent;
under Louis XII. there was nothing but high-starched neck-ruffs; under
Francis I. nothing but low-necked dresses cut square in front, and boldly
gored to a point behind.
The philosophic spirit, untrammelled by physical barriers, manifested
itself in the internationalisation of fashions.
It was known throughout western Europe that a fashion adopted by Isabella
of Mantua was one to be followed, and that the ladies of Paris were
adepts in matching bright colours, and ridiculously concealed their faces
under thick veils. It was the acme of good style to dress one day like a
Frenchwoman, the next like a German, Italian or Greek.
The platonists somewhat resented this vulgar application of their ideas;
that was not their conception of cosmopolitanism. To weld the minds of
men, to introduce into men’s hearts far and wide the truly refining
leaven of affection, fraternal concord and tenderness, by means of the
common love of the beautiful—that they could applaud. But masquerades
like these—what a mockery! In this matter, however, their authority was
ineffectual; a stronger was required. Francis I. knit his brows when
Spanish mantillas made their appearance at his court; he had his own
reasons for not being fond of them. He said that he believed himself
among a rout of devils. This one saying accomplished what no arguments
would ever have succeeded in doing: the Spanish frippery was packed away
in the wardrobes until the political sky changed.
Nevertheless, the intellectual preoccupation made its way, and people
were willing to pay regard, up to a certain point, to Plato’s principle
that the soul rather than the body is to be clothed: in other words they
proclaimed a correlation between the colour of the petticoats and the
state of the soul. Everybody knew that there are physical harmonies which
hold absolutely; that sober tints suit the pale, dull colours people of
bilious complexion, and bright tones faces inclined to ruddiness. But
people rarely thought—they did not trouble to think—that there might be
for souls a similar harmony, much loftier, of much greater importance,
and much more necessary to observe; for the complexion may be improved
by a touch of the paint-brush, while the soul must be kept as it is. M.
Jules Lemaître, whose genius is thoroughly French and whose opinion it
is always a pleasure to quote in matters of good sense, has in our own
time this quaint idea: “Our fathers, who wore lace and feathers, coats
red, blue, dove-coloured, apple-green, and soft-hued lilac, could not but
feel more disposed to joy, seeing each other blooming like flower-beds.
If fashion should some day make us walk the streets in purple silks, we
should forthwith be rescued from doubt and despair.”
That is philosophically true. It must be remembered that we cannot
isolate ourselves; we are dependent in a high degree on the world around
us. The inward joy we seek to create needs an external joy for its
support; the sun, the blue sky, the luxuriance of flowers, the clearness
of the air, the boundless gaiety and infinite cordiality of Nature
quicken and penetrate us; a grey sky and a dull horizon will never kindle
glowing reflections in our soul.
It is needful and right that men, and above all women, should display
an infectious joy and vitality also, that we should not have to puzzle
out the real person under the tasteless guise of a vulgar fashion-plate,
cut from a price list and flung over the shoulders. Everyone should make
his dress a palpable expression of his life and joy, like the flowers
and birds and fruits. The Catholic religion intuitively seized on this
profound truth; it retained and developed, with the pageantry of its
ceremonies, the gold-embroidered copes flashing with sombre brilliance,
and all this red and white and blue the purpose of which is to make
us forget that these celebrants singing as they move are men, and to
represent them to us as the very flower of our ideas, as the essence
of our tenderest prayers and affections. Of this admirable demand for
the embellishment of life we have preserved only one melancholy symbol,
mourning. Men, with their customary suits of solemn black, may be said
to carry everywhere with them the idea of disenchantment, of the awful
paltriness and the perpetual mournfulness of the soul: there is nothing
of a man about them; they go about the streets like the scattered parts
of one huge machine.
And this self-abnegation has nothing to do with material questions
of comfort or economy; there is no woman so poor that she cannot, if
she wishes, rise above her wretchedness by means of these external
symbols. Such at least was the opinion of the sixteenth-century women.
To them every colour spoke of the soul and to the soul; it was the
ensign of one’s spiritual fatherland, or, to use a modern metaphor, a
railway signal-light; white, the line is clear! it signifies a heart
free as air, a soul unappropriated or at any rate overflowing with
youthfulness; green, it is springtime with the soul, in the full vigour
of sweet acknowledged hopes; red, an utter despair! The cloth of gold,
the golden jewels then so much in vogue, represented the rich glow of
sunlight, the spacious joy of life! Whoever wished might approach and
find warmth and gladness. Celestial blue meant to the Italians soft
ethereal happiness; to the French, a tender and fortunate love. Black was
regarded as melancholy: yet this colour, incapable of fading, symbolised
constancy, firmness, and had its friends in consequence. Why restrict
it to mourning, as though our feelings for our dead are alone eternal?
Margaret, who loved and encouraged the use of black, protests:
Le noir, souvent, se porte pour plaisir,
Et plus souvent que pour peine et tourment.[191]
However, people generally preferred not to take their pleasure in black.
Rabelais allowed in the Abbey of Thelema none but brilliant costumes: he
wished to have one colour a day, and that the days should be told off as
white, pink, yellow, red, green—never black.
Thus the sartorial art, in spite of little encouragement, itself came at
last to exhale a perfume of life and the ideal. Unhappily it had a cruel,
powerful foe, which was incessantly to check its aspirations and keep it
in perpetual bondage to materialism. This foe was the vulgar passion for
sumptuous display, the terrible taste that substituted a mere ostentation
of wealth for a garb expressive of art and sentiment.
The French never recovered from that fever.
When Charles VIII. found himself face to face with the court of Ludovico
Il Moro,[192] sinking under the weight of golden shoulder-knots and
jewellery, a thrill shot through the French army.
From that time it was vain for the preachers to join hands with the
philosophers and demonstrate the infinite vulgarity of luxuriousness and
its deplorable moral effects; it was vain for the legislators to enact
laws; the die was cast.
People were dazzled, fascinated by wealth: they knew not nor wished
to know what wretchedness it cloaked, how many women, and some of the
noblest of them, ruined themselves in their vanity, how many others lived
by expedients that would not bear the light.[193]
Assuredly, magnificence had a glory of its own: there was no lack of
gazetteers to applaud to the echo the marvels seen on great occasions:
“Signorina Bulcano, in white cloth with gold trimmings and a golden
girdle; her Excellency the Countess Maddaloni in red velvet; her
Excellency the Countess du Rugo, in red cloth with large gold necklace.”
There is this to be said, indeed, that these chroniclers, superior in
this respect to some of ours, were destined to come down to posterity.
Nevertheless, this was inevitably the death of platonism, the ruin of
all it loved and all it desired. A fine thing to characterise a lady by
the cloth or velvet with which she garbed her bust or limbs! In this
profound decadence of taste people came to see some good in the general
worship of close-fitting garments, for, now that women were nothing but
dolls, it was certainly better that they should appear jointed. And
what seriousness could be expected of, what noble idea or worthy aim
could be suggested to, a woman who was a slave to her gloves, her hats,
her jewels, who spent part of her day in close confabulation with her
dressmaker or jeweller?
Cest anneau est du temps passé,
Ce ruby est mal enchassé,
Ce saintureau n’est pas fort gent.
Ma troussoire n’est que d’argent,
J’en veuil une batue en or....[194]
and so on indefinitely: that was how she talked; she was no longer her
own, she was a slave. Satan in the pit of hell was bewailing, it seems,
the fact that he no longer saw rustling about, as formerly, dresses
“open down to the waist”; and he cursed platonism! He might make himself
easy, there were still most melting sights for him! And his colleague
Lucifer sets himself to cheer him, showing him the league of vanity
mounting to the assault of the Beautiful, the almost invincible might
of money, combated and proscribed above, triumphing and swarming on all
sides under the most pitiful forms of jealousy and coquetry: among good
housewives, who have neither grasped nor retained anything of the new
ideas but an instinct for rigging themselves out to play the countess
or the duchess—among kitchen wenches who deck themselves in fallals and
furbelows in apish imitation of their mistresses.
Unhappily, the king went over to the side of vanity; official France
allied itself with the most dangerous adversaries of Roman philosophism
and intellectual splendour: with the Milanese, whose tinsel and
fripperies amused all Italy; and the Venetians, a people of large
expense. The struggle was thus fought out between sensuous gratification
and aestheticism. It did not alarm the platonists: they were prepared for
it; as Castiglione says: “There are fools everywhere.”
But this was of all battles the most arduous, because the dividing line
between coquetry and a woman’s duty to be pleasant was not always very
clearly marked. A few exceptional persons had the gift of admirably
combining the two tendencies; these as a rule were Italian women. At a
celebrated ball given by the court of France in 1518, two ladies, Italian
both, were queens—queens of beauty and of charm; the one, Clara Visconti
Pusterla, devoted to white, made a brilliant figure with her silver
embroideries and ropes of pearls; the other, a sister of Count Borromeo
of Milan, was a dazzling apparition in cloth of gold and diamonds. Yet
it was felt how secondary and precarious were successes of this external
kind, and how wrong it would be for women to regard them as the real
basis of their influence. They were only one means.
The fashion in regard to dwelling-house and furniture followed almost the
same rules as that of costume; for in a well-ordered house everything
harmonised with the people inhabiting it. The house is, so to speak, a
magnificent garment, the garment defending our existence against the
weather, the night, the intrusions of external life. Here, too, symmetry
of arrangement and studied designs are of little moment: the house should
exercise a charm, and there are ugly houses which are infinitely pleasing.
A house is pleasing when its appearance is original and homogeneous;
when its inhabitant has lovingly put into it something of his own
individuality, when it is not merely a classical and regular arrangement
of stones erected on some vacant spot, or a gimcrack toy with pretentious
and purposeless decorations; it pleases if serious thought has gone to
the arrangement of its parts, if it has projections, angles, recesses
judiciously contrived, and making it, so to speak, a living, breathing
thing. This is the first rule: a masculine purposefulness.
The second and the feminine rule is that the house should present a
great aspect of pleasantness, an appearance of amiability. It is of vast
importance that it should not clash with the landscape; it should fuse
with it, espouse in some sort circumambient nature, so as to radiate an
influence far beyond its actual site. This harmony results as a rule from
mutual accommodations; a gloomy house, for instance, will not be planted
in a smiling landscape; in a wooded or rugged but spacious locality a man
will set an extensive abode, without fantastic decorations, a house which
dominates outbuildings and approaches; no gildings, no polychrome effects
will be thrown up against a leaden sky: a church will not be constructed
in the style of a hammam, nor a stock-exchange in the form of a Greek
temple. The house, whatever it be, must smile, with a frank and loyal
smile, speaking through its façade and its approaches to the good folk
who pass, and beaming on them a look of friendliness.
In the interior, to furnish it, that is to say, to render it habitable,
all smiles and happy memories,—this again is to enlarge oneself,
to complete oneself: and it is here that woman’s art is absolutely
indispensable. A human dwelling in the nature of the case can make no
claim to a proud immortality. Every passing season attacks and tends to
destroy it; whilst the objects of nature renew themselves unceasingly
by the automatic movement of their latent vitality, it is needful for
us at every moment more or less to reconstruct our shelter, under pain
of seeing it crumble and fall before our eyes. It is like one of the
fruits of our life. Thus, while it should be as solid as possible, while
reminding us of the persons with whom it has successively lived, it must
show itself supple and give expression to our present life, if only by
fleeting suggestions, corresponding to the various impressions of our
existence, and dying when we die.
It was in this direction that the fine taste of prelates and ladies gave
itself free and glorious scope. A lover of the beautiful is so keenly
conscious that everything about him ought to be the manifestation of
some flash of thought! A chair, a couch, a piece of tapestry, all must
speak to us and exhort us to live the life of the heart, without allowing
ourselves to be crushed or numbed. At Rome, the home of this dominant
spirit, and even at Naples, the rays of its influence extended almost
inimitably; and it so well attained its object that a people wonderfully
sensitive, amiable, enthusiastic, ignorant of physical wants, became
enamoured of these glories of high culture of which, however, it barely
caught the reflection, and attuned itself to them. Men hoped the time
was at hand when all mankind would delight in beauty, they fancied
that they were born to live under glorious ceilings, among palm-trees,
gushing fountains and marvels of art. To this day the humblest of flymen
dilates with pride in the artistic treasures of his city. And how
diplomatically Isabella of Mantua went to work to surround herself with
splendid objects! What care Vittoria Colonna took in the mere ordering
of a casket! They appreciated equally the charm of collecting antiques,
diamonds, pictures, pottery, plate; the sole desideratum was that the
object of their quest should be beautiful or rare, the expression of an
artistic idea or an evocation of the past, that it should add to the
Attic charm of life, play its part in the cultivation of taste; in a
word, that it should be loved. Life thus, in its superb radiance, assumed
a grandeur and delightfulness of which we too caught the secret, in those
days when the palaces at Rome still had their galleries, the villas their
delightful rows of oleanders, the ruins their majesty. It was a genuine
and glorious sumptuousness, well calculated to elevate men’s minds! No
wonder that the desire of sharing in it spread through the world, and
that, unchecked by natural divisions, men’s hearts were simultaneously
possessed by one grand impulse towards beauty. This embroidery of life
contributed in large measure to the sentiment of the brotherhood of man
which then declared itself, and which appeared so singular; to-day we
do not truly realise its importance, because, thanks to the mechanical
lessening of distances, all men have become neighbours (and unpleasant
neighbours at that): a varnish of uniformity has spread itself over
everything; milkmaids and princesses often read the same books, wear
almost the same hats, marry at the same age and with the same ideas. But
in those days it was an absolutely new thing, when national diversities
and individual liberties were so strongly accentuated, to create a
harmony of ideas and a fellowship in love, of which the women were the
natural harbingers.
Enter the palace of Margaret of Austria at Brussels, and, if you do not
find yourself back in Rome or Florence, yet you will at once perceive
that the remarkable mind of a princess has there gathered together all
that gives charm to life: a vast library, well supplied with romances,
history and poetry; furniture of priceless value, stately busts,
brilliant mirrors, portraits of all the princes and princesses of the
time, and by their side the portraits of notorious fools: a medley of
life and ideas; various pedigrees of the house of Austria, a trophy of
Indian feathers of brilliant colours, fierce shaggy heads of wolves,
broad fans, glistening armour, crystals, priceless caskets, medallions,
majestic chandeliers, articles in jasper and adamant; on the walls,
admirable Flemish tapestries spangled with gold or silver; on the floor,
warm, thick-piled carpets; here and there valuable pictures in profusion.
The visitor’s curiosity, solicited on all sides, knows not at first where
to stop to admire. And these various objects, individual as they are,
become animate and dwell together in a sort of high, grand, collective
existence: the one mind which discovered their affinities seems to
permeate them, sets them vibrating in unison, and thus penetrates the
soul of the visitor.
Through this great science of intellectually adorning the material
conditions of life a first result was obtained: men loved life. Sadness
concealed itself, joy kept the whole world dancing to its merry pipe. It
was impossible to be anything but gay and amiable. If it chanced that
someone was to be buried, it was with full orchestral accompaniment,
amid the twinklings of a thousand tapers, and with a ceremony quite
lyrical. If perchance a man desired a melancholy funeral, he would do
well to say so in his will and prescribe the number of candles; but most
often men set their hearts on dying gallantly, and did not dream of
depriving their friends of an honourable entertainment or of economising
on behalf of their heirs.
CHAPTER IV
THE EMBROIDERY OF LIFE
Meanwhile, there is a life to live, there are things to do! A woman must
get happiness from the exercise of all her activities, both spontaneous
and enforced—even more than from her drawing-room or her jewels. We
propose to pass in review as large a number of these occupations as
possible, to show that, small or great, there is not one but appears to a
woman a source of joy and glory if she mingles love with it. Everything
she does, however infinitely humble, be it kneading bread for her husband
or washing his feet, is vivified with a transfiguring radiance whenever
the spirit of abnegation animates her toil, whenever she reflects that
this husband is not the sole man existing in the world, nor a sort of
domestic drill-sergeant, but represents the eternal idea sounding in
every heart. We have already seen these noble women in days of trouble
quivering with devotion at the bedside of their sick husbands; it is
the same in days of happiness. They find strength in abstraction; the
things that surround us so marvellously change their aspect, contract,
expand, according as we take them for what they are or glorify them with
thoughts of higher things—thoughts, not idle fancies, whether roseate or
gloomy, whether too brilliant in prospect or too distressing in reality.
It is chiefly in domestic life that abstraction is useful. The woman must
steep her hands in beauty, fill her eyes with love, and then look at
things courageously and truthfully. Everything, even vice itself, appears
frigid, vulgar, and commonplace to materialists; women ought (yes, ought,
not merely can) to render everything warm and gay—even virtue.
Let us take haphazard some of the doings which most strikingly exhibit
them—their eating, walking, country habits, Sunday occupations. From
each of these they are able to strike the sacred spark. We shall see how
everything is transfigured in their hands.
First then, their eating. Nothing is more material in itself, and nothing
better lends itself to spiritualisation.
A house was characterised by the way in which a formal dinner was
managed; this was the touchstone of true style. On the table was placed
the massive and weighty silver plate, the family treasure which the
mistress of the house kept under lock and key, and which was worth a
fortune. The plate of some families was valued at a million francs. On
days of high festivity the table blazed with ponderous gold, but they
were content with silver for private dinners.
The regulation of the menu was rightly regarded as a matter of such
difficulty and importance that men of the highest merit made it their
study to lay down fixed principles on the subject. Fulvio Orsini[195] has
acquainted us with all the best traditions of ancient Rome. Platina,[196]
the Raphael of the tribe, published under the auspices of Cardinal
Roverella a treatise which may be cited as a perfect model.
In countries strange to the new ideas, men thought only of their palates,
_os sublime_, in the ironical phrase of Brandt.[197] In Germany guzzling,
at rare intervals but in enormous quantities, was the only joy. So
late as the end of the century Montaigne asked a former ambassador in
Germany how often he had been obliged to get drunk in the service of his
sovereign, and the ambassador reckoned up with all gravity, and declared
that he had got off with three occasions, all told.
The French traditional practice was the same. Fairs, markets,
pilgrimages, weddings, baptisms, funerals, anniversaries, meetings of
gilds or corporations all served as pretexts for village gourmandisings
characterised by enthusiastic drunkenness, and often enlivened with
brawls in which both sexes took part. At the end of one of these feasts
we find the wife of the gild president dealing most energetically with
a toper who had called her an “old witch.” The châteaux were no less
fond of high feeding.[198] Historians ought to consult the kitchen
account-books! Without them they will never succeed in arriving at
well-founded judgments; we know no human document more convincing, none
which enables us with more certainty to reconstruct a bygone mode of
life. Unhappily the old kitchen books of France reveal a deplorable
spectacle; it is one long procession of herds of oxen and flocks of
sheep, innumerable poultry, rabbits and partridges by the dozen, small
game in hundreds, and pigs in disgusting profusion. The whole of the
delicacies consists, even in the most distinguished houses, of a few
cloves or sticks of cinnamon to make hippocras of. As to the wine, it is
wine of the current vintage drawn from the cask! Caesar Borgia must have
been greatly surprised one Friday, in the winter of 1498, while staying
with Madame de la Trémoille, to see filing in a course of two hundred
and fifty fish. The next day, again a fast day, the avenues leading to
the château were thronged with carts loaded with fish, in honour of the
visit of King Louis XII.; in particular there arrived seven hundred and
fifty eels. This was in Rabelais’ country. Further, in regard to tutelary
geniuses of the table, they were acquainted with none but appalling
spectres—Dame Gout,[199] Madam Gravel, or my Lady Apoplexy, to whom they
gaily made their salutations.[200]
Then comes philosophy to preside at their feasts with salutary effect.
It teaches men that dining is a spiritual function. The table becomes
idealised. Much thought is devoted to its decorations, to regaling the
eyes with the sight of beautiful birds in their charming many-hued
plumage—peacocks, storks, or small and pretty birds strung on skewers.
The mistress of the house shows her art in having the daintiest courses
served on gold and crystal—things which while tickling the palate
content the mind; first dessert, composed of fruits and sweetmeats, then
compounds of eggs or fish, light dishes, in which pistachios, pepper,
ginger, rosemary, thyme, peppermint—everything that has sweetness or
aroma insinuates itself and figures in manifold combinations. Just as in
Plato’s _Symposium_, people take their places at table not to eat but
to talk, because conversation can have no warmer, more cheerful, more
restful setting. Often in the platonist system some incomparable lady
presided, and everything centred in her; from her eyes “rained love,”
that is, in the words of the guests, “meat and drink, ambrosia and
nectar.” She set the pitch; there was a cross-fire of witticisms flashing
over the table like fireworks, or else wit fluttered lightly about amid
a subdued hum of laughter. With one consent these were voted delightful
hours. Men fuddled themselves with talk: “’Tis my greatest vice,”
confesses Erasmus.
This art became so well acclimatised at the court of Francis I. that it
soon became the joy of France. Margaret of France writes enthusiastically
about those dinners at which they used to “fill themselves with words
more than with meat.” French wit, which always owes a little to good
cheer, sparkled quite naturally.
In Italy they were at fault in using aesthetic means too freely to
support the dinner. They durst not trust simply to conversation, but
employed music, a proceeding which appeared rank heresy in France. King
Alfonso of Naples, indeed, long regarded as the pastmaster of good
living, complicated his dinners with all sorts of refinements; after the
first courses, the ears were enchanted with harmonies soft as the breeze
of Capri blowing over the sparkling, rippling sea; or else there were
mimes, the _pulcinella_,[201] and roars of laughter. Then his guests
returned to the table and remained till the moment when, their heads
swimming with the strong and generous fumes of Falernian, they removed
the plate and withdrew.
In Germany the whole day was spent at the table, with a licence that
was often gross, and with all that old mediaeval gaiety of which the
_Table-talk_ of Luther has preserved an excellent specimen. Yet the Rhine
is not so broad nor the Alps so high but that such customs soon appeared
disgusting and lamentable when compared with the politer modes which
were spreading through the world. Many writers endeavoured to polish
these table manners by publishing manuals of etiquette and collections of
_bons mots_. If they did not establish the complete art of conversation
they indicated its rudiments, and indeed their success was sufficient to
necessitate in 1549 a recasting of the fourth edition of the classical
collection of Gastius,[202] and the suppression of a certain number of
pleasantries which seemed out of place “in view of the distresses of the
time.” Thus the art of table-talk became so popular that even in Germany
people endeavoured to cultivate it; but sprightliness, which is its very
salt, remained till further orders a distinctively French quality.
The ball and the dance, though much more aesthetic in themselves,
were a great deal more difficult to idealise, because in them the
sensuous element bulks more largely. Here, however, there was no need
to exaggerate, and to proscribe dancing would have been absurd. What
could be more ridiculous than the jealousy of certain husbands (husbands
do not stand sufficiently in awe of ridicule!). And it was so useless,
too. A woman who has her wits about her is never at a loss for a pretext
for going to a rout; there is always a young girl at hand who needs
chaperoning. Someone, indeed, mentions a young matron of Louise of
Savoy’s own court, who, to save an old husband an apoplectic fit, had the
heroism to immure herself at home; but this is dead against the spirit
of sociability. Why forge useless chains? Vivès himself, who is not open
to suspicion, agrees that “dancing is a very natural accompaniment
to the pleasures of society and the table.” But there is dancing and
dancing. The ideal of platonist joy and happiness would be a free and
thoroughly intellectual dance with a calm and delicious rhythm, a dance
that would add a pleasure to life, the dancer in light floating drapery,
bare-footed, bare-headed, ungirt, in the sweet air of springtime, on a
smooth, soft lawn among jasper and coral, under the long-leaved palms,
amidst the scent of roses and pine-trees—an intoxicating dance the pure
motion of which harmonises with the vast music of Nature, the cooing of
doves, the mighty arpeggios of the sea. The woman who, alone or hand
in hand with her companions, abandons herself to this exquisite charm,
this magical sweetness, who associates herself with all things in this
imponderable rhythm—does she not represent a goddess of happiness, and
does she not come to incarnate for us the divine charm of Nature?
In practice the dance hardly attains this ideal; yet, even confined
within the walls of a room and reduced to a social art, it can still meet
the high demands of moral fellowship and become for women an instrument
of the most legitimate charm. The Italians especially excelled in
giving it a solemn air of sentimental gravity; some of their fêtes are
remarkable in history—for example, the ball given at Milan by Francesco
Bernardino Visconti on October 15, 1499, in honour of the conqueror,
Louis XII., or, in point of magnificence, the subscription ball got up by
the household servants of Venice in February, 1524. These were memorable
triumphs of art. But this high significance of the ball was never
understood in France. When people gave a ball they troubled themselves
very little about posterity, but a great deal about a certain number of
trifling present joys; and these made women descend a little from their
pedestal.
There was in particular one peculiar custom, eminently pleasant in
itself, but not very celestial, and lending itself to abuses. This was
the custom of kissing.
Well-bred men in every country used respectfully to kiss a lady’s
hand.[203] The Italians did so with fervour; if required they would have
kissed the feet; and a man had to be a German to stigmatise as idolatry
the kiss applied to the toes of the Pope! Italian women disported with
this kissing with perfect grace and all sorts of little refinements. At
a casual meeting they confined themselves to a pleasant handshake; but
tête-à-tête with a man they wished to honour, they would be the first
to kiss his hand, fondly, and without any of those affectations of
bashfulness which sometimes inspire such bitter afterthoughts. It was a
charming and very natural custom; but in France it took quite another
complexion. Men, being the masters, knew nothing of fine shades and nice
distinctions; the having to greet or take leave of an agreeable woman was
sufficient pretext for kissing her lips, and the motive they alleged for
this proceeding was that it struck them as being “amiable and sweet.”
In the ballroom it was another story; every dance-figure ended in a
kiss, and if we must add that it was complicated with wild and giddy
horse-play, it must be remembered that a French ball was racy of the
soil. Like a genuine Frenchman, Louis XII. felt it his duty at Bernardino
Visconti’s ball to kiss one after another all the ladies presented to
him, in other words, every woman in Lombardy.
Ah! if the platonists and the true friends of women had been heeded,
things would have been different! They were scandalised at such
spectacles, which poisoned their intellectual joys. Years before,
Petrarch had risen against customs that much less affected their
position: what would he have said if he had come to life again! The worst
of it was that these French manners were like the little leaven, and
Castiglione notes that the leaven was creeping into Italy—Castiglione,
who had seen the time when a man durst not even take the hand of his
partner! As to Vivès, he dashes off a picture of dances and kisses
with his Spanish impetuosity: “What is the meaning of so many kisses?
Of old time it was lawful to give a kiss only to one’s relatives; now
’tis a general custom, in Burgundy and in England, to kiss whomsoever
a man pleases.... As for me, I would fain know what means so much
osculation.... What is the use of these many leaps that girls make, held
by their companions under the arms so that they may kick the higher? What
pleasure do these grasshoppers take in torturing themselves thus and
remaining the greater part of the night without wearying of the dance
body and soul?”
The question was more than once raised as to what extent good manners
authorised, or rather obliged, well-born women to offer their lips to all
and sundry, and to lend themselves to promiscuous capering.[204] This
question was much debated: in general the most sensible folk considered
that they could not absolutely avoid the custom, accepted as it was in
good society, but that it was possible to practise some reserve; for
example, to present the cheek instead of the mouth. Montaigne pities with
all his heart the women “who have to lend their lips to any Jack with
three lackeys in his suite”; but so trivial a subjection seemed to him,
by its very triviality, to be of no consequence: “A high price adds a
flavour to meat!” He holds rather with those who saw in it a simple act
of courtesy, to which an honest woman could have no possible objection,
or at most so insignificant a favour that there was nothing to make a
fuss about. We are bound to add, however, that this was not everyone’s
opinion; and there were not wanting dilettantes who by no means regarded
this favour as so unimportant; Ronsard in all frankness considered
it delightful and took infinite pleasure in it.[205] As to Melin de
Saint-Gelais, on one occasion when he had won a dozen kisses at forfeits,
he swore that it was not half enough: “Twelve is too few, compared with
the infinite.”
Here again fashion was more than a match for philosophy; and, barring a
few isolated exceptions, kissing and dancing carried all before them.
Examples come from all sides: from the court with its licentious masked
balls, and from the heart of the provinces; witness that singular strike
of the ladies of Aix in Provence. The courts having interdicted, on the
score of modesty, the dance known as the _volta_ (a sort of cancan),
these ladies at once threatened to betake themselves _en masse_ to
the pope at Avignon, and their affrighted husbands had to obtain the
annulment of the decree.
The platonists and their friends knew the world too well deliberately
to open a campaign against abuses they could not destroy. They confined
themselves to bewailing them. It struck them as deplorable to see men
amusing themselves hour after hour in cutting their clownish capers at
the expense of honest women. They considered it absolutely ridiculous to
pretend to forbid men in the ordinary intercourse of life to smirch by
word, look or gesture a lady who pleased them, while at a ball everything
was permissible.
The remedy, they thought, would be found in giving women more serious and
more elevated tastes; they believed that a woman habituated to really
noble ideas would know how to set herself high enough to win love without
yielding to the caprice of the first comer.
The Huguenots pursued a different policy, and did not shrink from
attacking with all their force every kind of dancing: it would seem that
they did not dance at all. They spoke of animals coupling, of disastrous
confidences: “Look,” cries the good Daneau[206] with horror, “look at
this lady with her head high, vaulting, whirling, swinging herself about,
making a clatter with her feet.” That was what you saw at the ball: could
anything be more ridiculous? But what most strikes him is that she leaves
her modesty and her mantle together in the-hands of the lackeys in the
cloak-room. “There any man may run his eye over the ladies as they stand,
even with their husbands or mothers, and may choose any woman he pleases,
in other words, the woman who excites his lust: those whom the eyes have
chosen the hands clasp, and the men, as though already in the thrill
and enjoyment of their desires, kiss them, hug them, lead them through
the room; the young fellows exert themselves to appear lively and gay,
so as to entertain and caress with a thousand tricks and approaches the
girls they hold, and the girls show no reluctance to respond in kind. In
the _volta_ there are regular tricks for making one’s partner bound and
rise so high that the calves, even the thighs are shamelessly exposed
and prostituted to the eyes of the throng. The dancers go up and down,
lose sight of each other, then find themselves close together again; and
when they meet there are oglings and caperings, redoubled gaieties, all
showing how their hearts are bounding with joy at seeing themselves once
more so near the accomplishment of their desires. Every kind of dance
gives opportunity for discovering ways of pleasing, seeing, touching one
another more familiarly; and all this goes on to the strains of all sorts
of instruments.”
The Huguenots, it will be seen, did not mince their words. But dancing
was never a whit the worse. According to the feminists it was in itself
neither evil nor ridiculous; the art consisted in idealising the play
of the limbs, as the work of the digestion had been idealised; and they
were agreed that, the brain being in this case farther away, the task was
obviously more difficult.
On the other hand, women readily gave up anything that was not congenial
to sensibility: gaming, for instance. With their husbands gaming was a
frenzy; mature men, boys, busy men, idle men, everybody gambled. At the
gaming table all distinctions of rank disappeared; a great lord would
borrow a hundred crowns from his barber. What was a gaming-hall? A place
where not a word was uttered save as an exclamation or an oath. The
ladies permitted a game of draughts, chess or trictrac, but would hear of
nothing else. They preferred the embraces of which Daneau, Vivès and the
husbands complained.
For ladies of middle station a usual means of exercising their charm to
the best advantage was to go to mass, especially on a Sunday, to the
“church parade”; that served them instead of a drawing-room.
We have nothing to do here, of course, with their religious sentiments,
but only with their visible devices for captivating men. They went to
church as to a common haunt or a family reunion. God is the good Father
who collects His children about Him once a week. Sunday is the day
consecrated to lofty impressions, to the enjoyment in common of the
things that constitute life—the day of beauty, the day of music, lovely
frescoes, and displays of the latest fashion. The sanctuary was treated
with an affectionate familiarity, against which the preachers had long
been protesting in vain.
In the northern parts indeed this familiarity was accompanied with very
objectionable scenes, and the clergy were at great pains to restrain its
abuses. At Tournay, for example, it appeared very disagreeable to the
cathedral clergy to serve every year as lay figures in the grotesque
procession of the Holy Innocents, and afterward to be abbots of misrule
in taverns; they obtained the suppression of the festival in 1489.
But the coarse merriment was not scotched; everybody, the principal
personages of the town included, made common cause with the children
dispossessed of so venerable a privilege; and in 1498 the agitation took
the shape of a nocturnal kettle-drumming which gave great concern to the
Parliament of Paris.
In the south there was no need to fear such eccentricities; the church
was the temple of the Beautiful because it belonged to the women.
The congregation gathers in a motley, swaying, chattering crowd; it
takes some time for every lady to succeed in settling her finery on
her cushion, in a convenient place for seeing and hearing well. Then
there arises a confused hum of gossip more or less discreet, a sound of
stifled laughter, a rustling of cushions: “There is no better place for
a chat than church”; it is for all the world like a concert of “magpies
caught in a snare.” Ladies call each other by name, “Jeanne, Catherine,
Françoise.” A lady who comes late tries to skip in before another who
arrived early. The orchestra can barely drown all these noises; the
opening prayer is delayed. Many men standing in the aisles fancy they
are on ’change, and talk over their affairs; at one time dandies used to
come hawk on fist or dog at heel: others, motionless like machines, are
meditating—who knows what? Nothing at all, probably. Some are watching
the many-coloured undulations in the nave—the crimped hair, the dainty
hats. They quiz a handsome blue bodice with yellow strings and green
sleeves, cut very low. The ladies have a wonderful talent for sitting
stiffly erect, posing in such a way that they show their profile or
half-profile to the best advantage, their eyes sparkling, and sometimes
stealing a wicked little side-glance. That is what they call high mass;
those are the accessories of a fashionable confessional.
In this way a fine philosophic equality establishes itself with the
utmost perfection at the steps of the altar, far more successfully than
in any palace; all cliquishness even disappears; a woman who has toiled
all the week at her spinning-wheel displays her charms by the side of the
lady of rank, moved by the same sentiment of elegance, idleness, and art.
For anyone with the least spark of sensibility or love of the beautiful,
church becomes the land of dreams, the starting-point for every elevating
influence. The Gothic church, with its lofty, light, graceful columns,
lifts the soul into a sort of mystic accord; there is something warmer,
more human, more genuinely intimate about the Italian church; women
high or humble experience there a sensation of unmixed delight. They
contemplate with tender trustfulness the imperturbable Madonna who has
already seen the passage of many generations, and who continues to regard
them from her nook in the wall with her woman’s smile—that smile of
infinite sweetness, of lingering and universal pity, directed towards the
children and the dead, towards all who suffer and love, weep and laugh,
a smile like a sweet-savoured incense of purification and grace. The
Italians loved the magnificence of their temples—the marbles bathed in
sunlight, the shadowy arches where the soul could unbosom itself without
blasphemy, and all those little secluded chapels in which every man
found his own saint, and came to offer up his poor, trembling, fainting
heart as the whole _ex-voto_ of life. In these hidden splendours, in the
charm of mystic music soaring amidst paintings and sculptures, gilded
ornaments and exquisite perfumes, midway between the past and the future,
there is a wonderfully soft and voluptuous pleasure. It is with profound
philosophy that Caviceo lays the scene of the first interview between
his hero and heroine in the shade of an altar; assuredly, in wrapping
itself with this veil of refinement and modesty, love puts on a sacred
character. So the church becomes, in its wealth of compassion, the haven
of refuge for pure and sensitive souls, and even for some others. Anne
of Rohan gave tryst to her lover in the chapel of Amboise;[207] a young
girl of Orleans with Machiavelian cunning made a Franciscan friar her
catspaw to attract the student she loved.[208] Pontanus depicts the
prolonged meditations of the Neapolitan ladies, long after the last of
the candles had been extinguished in the dusky nave.[209] A thousand
incidents of this sort might be cited: Francis I. in the church of
Amboise pursuing a charming girl with his devotion;[210] Panurge, whom
Rabelais sets to dog the footsteps of a noble lady, piously offering
her holy water, slipping inflammatory love-letters into her hand during
mass, and playing the most impudent tricks to attract her attention; the
poet Crétin, furious because at Lyons the church services are turned to
account almost exclusively by young fops and paunchy bankers.
Pilgrimages also were capable of becoming a source of exquisite emotions
for artists in happiness. The author of the _Imitation_ has said that to
be often on pilgrimage is seldom to be a saint. Indeed, at the moment
when the indulgences were pronounced, the church porches were quite
invisible behind the smoke from the cookshops or the booths in the fair,
and an old author complains that you could not even catch sight of
your friends. But how these gross indulgences were transfigured by the
aesthetic spirit! What ravishing effects it derived from them!
It was no longer paintings or sculptures that troubled hearts and pure
hearts gazed upon: they penetrated the clear heavens above. Blessed are
the pure!
The sweet, tender Isabella d’Este set out thus to transport her soul
across the plains of Umbria, towards the calm and glorious homes of peace
and art, Loretto and Assisi. It was early spring, when the days were
clear and sunny; every morning after mass the little caravan resumed its
march with its picturesque escort, piously, tranquilly, ideally. During
the Easter festival it made a halt with the Duke and Duchess of Urbino
in the delightful palace of Gubbio, smiling down from amongst its gardens
and fountains.
The woman who has been able to live these hours of pure enthusiasm is
conscious of accomplishing a large part of her dream. She is within
sight of reconciling two opposing forces, the forces of Nature and the
forces of the human heart, and forming out of them a love in harmony with
Plato’s thought and Raphael’s brush.
In their dealings with Nature, the platonists sought above all to elevate
and sentimentalise it; they did not care for it masculine and stern, but
wished it feminine.
They did not ask it to express itself in vast horizons, in a display
of wild vigour. Untamed Nature displeased them; it struck them as a
tyrannical mechanism which would keep moving and straining itself without
definite purpose, whilst it should be influenced and controlled by human
thought. On the contrary, the more supple Nature became,—the more docile,
urbane, almost affectionate—the better she answered their expectations.
They did not appreciate the _objects_ of Nature; but they valued a
beautiful sunny day, a beautiful horizon, the flowers which scent the
air, the glistening, rippling, soothing sea, the buds bursting with
sap and life, because this life is one with man’s. Plato has indicated
the need he felt of such a setting in the celebrated prologue of the
_Phaedrus_, where Socrates and his friend, strolling along the bank of
the Ilissus, seat themselves near a temple of the Muses, in the shade of
a lofty plane-tree, on one of those velvet swards in which every footstep
leaves its trace. Stirred by the fierce heat of the glowing sun, life
buzzes and sings on all sides; the murmur of water mingles with the
chirp of grasshoppers and innumerable confused dronings; odours of all
kinds fill the air, and life is quaffed in deep draughts; but amid all
these myriad voices blending into one grand symphony the mind of the
philosopher reigns supreme.
Man, then, must in no way be considered the enemy of Nature; he is her
friend and master. Nature speaks to us, and we speak to her, and are
subject to her influence in the highest degree. Not merely do climate,
temperature, the beauties of the scenery exercise a paramount influence
upon us, as the monks so well understood who loved extensive horizons
and noble summits, but it may be said that there is not a tree or a plant
but influences us by its vicinage. The love of Nature emits a radiance
like the love of a woman, like all love, though in a less degree. It is
good then and right not to neglect so important a source of emotion.
Nature herself delights us because she smiles on us and we feel she
loves us,—because a higher power settles her proud rocks and governs her
volcanic fires. How pleasant it is (especially in warm countries) to
shape for ourselves in the broad world, too vast for us, a private and
particular nook: to send our very selves, as it were, out through the
woods by straight paths which make our will felt far away; to give the
flowers what forms and tints we please; to impress our character upon
everything; thus we banish all savour of imperfection and ugliness and
allow nothing to be seen but uniformity and affection; for, in the words
of a man of that time, if you go into the country, it is not to “descend
from light into the gloom.”
Salut! palais, jardins, paradis de délices,
Dont les beaultez font ignorer les vices.[211]
Under these circumstances, ladies, philosophers, and prelates considered
the country a perfect setting for the intellectual life. They there
got deeper, intenser spiritual enjoyment than in the city (though city
life in those days was not such a rush and bustle as it is to-day). The
dread hours of solitude will themselves contribute to this pleasure if
you know how to bring a delightful egotism unobtrusively into play;
they will enable you to recall many fleeting thoughts, to ruminate on
them, feast on them for your sole pleasure, in the spirit of the sublime
preoccupation of Lucullus when he chanced one day to be dining alone:
“Is not Lucullus entertaining Lucullus to-day?” We find, then, in the
country the same _mise-en-scène_ as in the town—the same furniture, the
same plate, but ranged under the luminous ceiling of a summer sky; the
same dances, but by the light of torches and the stars.[212] All Nature
breathes and thinks: the trees, artistically shaped, hang their sombre
drapery behind statues; charming walks wind or disappear among labyrinths
of laurel, thyme, and rosemary; a cascade leaps lightly and with musical
bickering from a tiny artificial rock, and speeds away swiftly but
noiselessly into the miniature presentment of a well-mown meadow. Or if
the owner’s wealth is equal to measuring itself royally against Nature,
he adorns the landscape with splendid villas, the glory of Rome, like
the Este villa at Tivoli, a sort of proof before letters of Versailles,
so moving still in the spectral life of its deserted groves, its silent
fountains, its shattered marbles.
We must note, too, the singular phenomenon that the urbanity and
bountifulness of Nature appeared to these lovers of beauty a thing of
course. Nature is loved for herself only in countries where she plays the
step-dame. Lombards, Frenchmen, Englishmen, on leaving the smoky scenes
of their daily toil, did not shrink from a life in the depths of a dull
place in the country, or from intercourse with the rustics; they might
be seen any day chatting and whiling away an idle hour with the farmers
on the village green. At Paris people were passionately fond of natural
flowers, the annual consumption of which was valued by statisticians at
fifteen thousand golden crowns; even the University preferred them to
paper garlands.[213] The people of the south, on the contrary, spoilt
children of a soil which yields fruit of itself, trampled roses and
violets beneath their feet with never a thought of gathering them. The
Italian painters used to adorn manuscripts with elaborate golden scrolls;
the ladies framed their faces in gold and pearls, and valued flowers
only for the delicate softness of their perfume; many of them strewed
lilies and roses and violets about their bowers, as the quintessence of
sweetness. But everyone abhorred a country life. Castiglione has only one
word for the existence of gentlemen-farmers: “It is indecent.” As for
Margaret of France, she could find no stronger abuse, no more expressive
appellation for a froward heart than: “O rough heart, rural and bucolic.”
Nor would one expect to find a liking for animals among the platonists.
Ladies valued only the boudoir pet, the little affectionate, obedient
animal, their very own, which meekly took their kisses and upon which
they lavished without misgiving a portion of their tenderness: a bird
for instance, or a pug. I say _a_ pug, for there was seldom more than
one. What was the good of a troop of shaggy animals however graceful,
like those which fill the canvases of Veronese? A lady much preferred
her one little lapdog, which she carried on her arm against her heart,
took to bed with her, and had painted in her own portrait. “Love me,
love my dog.” Titian’s Venus of the Prado is nude, but she keeps the
indispensable ornaments—a pearl necklace, a musical instrument, and a
little dog. Margaret in writing to M. de Montmorency[214] tells him gaily
that she is looking after her niece’s “belongings,” that is, “her parrot
and her daughters.” The death of the darling bird or the little pug was
a cruel event. What tears were shed! So faithful a little dog! How many
men might have learned a lesson from him! Friends could hardly venture
to speak of the fleas of the demised, or the hair that he dropped all
around, or the other objects which his mistress might perhaps find for
her affection.
People did not care for flocks and herds, except perhaps as a distant
ornament of the landscape. The King of Naples and the Cardinal of Amboise
kept peacocks and stags. Anne of France founded a sort of Zoological
Garden in which she acclimatised turkeys and bred parrots. But that had
nothing to do with aesthetics.
From country life we naturally proceed to the grave question of the
utility of physical exercises for women—a question much more difficult
to decide than appears at first sight. Suppose a number of old-style
French châtelaines, sun-baked, inured to the inclemencies of the weather,
dashing huntswomen, had been asked to relinquish violent exercises like
hunting, fencing, boxing, tennis, on the ground that to indulge in
them was to waste their charm? They would have ridiculed the idea. And
yet, after mature deliberation, the Urbino coterie decided that these
exercises were altogether incompatible with the feminine temperament.
One had to come to Lyons to find a pretty and clever woman like Louise
Labé posing as Bradamante or Marphise, and boasting of her riding and her
skill with the lance. Every well-born Italian woman detested such mannish
ways. When Charles VIII. arrived at Naples, the princess of Melphi,
to humour the barbarian’s tastes, presented to him her daughter on
horseback, but mounted in such a manner “as not to do wrong to her sex.”
Here there is a problem in pure aesthetics. Not that women like Isabella
d’Este and others are deficient in energy; when need arises they will
give proof of an extraordinary vigour; Margaret of France, in her passion
for serving her brother, bestrode a horse and galloped to the Spanish
frontier with a speed and endurance that the postal service has rarely
attained. But if, impelled by strong feeling, they accomplished feats
like this, they did not boast of them. What charm would Margaret with
all her heroism have for us if we had to see her flying with loose rein
astraddle on her nag? It is impossible to cite a military woman of a more
energetic temperament than Catherine Sforza: when did she shrink from
sleeping on the bare ground and passing her nights in the open air? Yet
this was the lady who, when she had a minute’s peace, solemnly dispatched
a Jewish old-clo’ man to her neighbours, to discover for her a certain
down for bed-ticks which was reputed exceptionally soft.
The very decided disfavour in which physical exercises were held by women
had its counterpart among the men, and very largely diminished their
ardour for anything in the way of sport or athletics. Even at the court
of Julius II. a young cardinal was mercilessly chaffed because, instead
of showing his visitors his books, coins, or pictures, he hurried them
off to a jumping-match in his garden! In France the taste for violent
exploits utterly died out, at least in court circles. When ladies were
by, there was much talk, in language borrowed from the romances, about
the virtue of arms and the nobility of valour, and as they spoke the
striplings brandished inoffensive swords. Tournaments were in favour as
a show adapted to captivate ladies’ eyes, and purely decorative—barring
accidents! Some in silver habits, others in red, green, and blue,
the combatants would make a few passes, and when they had done, the
victor, followed by his pages, galloped all round the fine-sanded
lists, to receive his meed of applause. After all, the ladies had
little appreciation for this relic of barbarism; they did not see the
philosophic necessity of equipping oneself with lance and steed to run
the _grand prix_ of life; in their view that prize was called “repose and
sovereign joy”; and that is not won at a gallop.
The question of the chase gave rise to somewhat various opinions.
Hunting, like war, gave man pleasure; to him it was a noble and sacred
occupation, since its end was the shedding of blood,—a point in which it
displeased the platonists. But, on the other hand, man is a born fighter,
and he should only be encouraged to work off his combativeness against
animals created precisely to be slaughtered by him. There is nothing
criminal in the trade of butcher, and it is far better to kill an ox than
a man, a boar than an ox. The chase was thus a valuable expedient.
But in an age of such exquisite refinement, when the infinite sweetness
of the Beautiful came at length to penetrate men to the very marrow,
people became more fastidious, and asked themselves if any brilliant idea
could be derived from the chase, or if it was not a sufficient concession
to the animal spirits to ramble about casually, to take the air without
excuses, and to go out riding under the eyes of the ladies, even though
too manifestly like a groom exercising his cob. Perhaps that would have
been better.
But the chase was popular at Rome.
The hunts in the Roman Campagna were of old renown. The deer there was
reputed very fleet, and the boar a particularly tough customer; the
hounds belonged to those idolised and sagacious breeds which could not be
bought at any price, and whose whelps were begged for by princesses and
potentates with absolute servility.[215] Further, in default of military
pomp, the glory of the chase, material as it was, seemed essential to the
political interests of the papacy,—and consequently to the interests of
religion,—with respect to certain eminent personages more accessible to
such arguments than to those of theology; and it must not be forgotten
that the Roman prelates, unfortunately for themselves, were politicians
as well as devotees of art. While closely allying themselves with women,
they had to reckon with men. The hunt organised by Paul II. for Borso
d’Este in 1471 has remained justly celebrated in the annals of the
church. It was therefore less a question of slaying animals than of
saving souls, and it may be said that in this respect the chase conduced
towards a spiritual end.
The great Popes of the Renaissance, however, were somewhat lukewarm
in cultivating it. Alexander VI., though an excellent horseman, was
but an infrequent and inexpert huntsman. Julius II. went out into the
rich vinelands rarely, if at all; for, born of a sea-faring stock, he
preferred to cast his nets into the deep like St. Peter. Leo X. rode
more, owing to threatenings of obesity; he hunted with application and
brilliance, and with his habitual love of perfection, but without that
quality which makes hunting an art, that indefinable something which
hunters call the “sacred fire” or the “devil may care” spirit, and the
friends of the Beautiful call love. He was a Florentine, and manifestly
did not regard the hunter’s rôle as a fine one; he could not imagine that
to spur a horse was to stimulate one’s ideas. To men of his stamp Nature
was, so to speak, truly feminine; they would have liked to put her under
glass. On the other hand, a number of prelates revived the chase with
their enthusiasm; they portrayed it in their poetry; they brought to it
all their gravity, urbanity, and decorum. When the ancient walls of pagan
Rome or the limestone benches of the Coliseum were blushing under the
first rays of dawn, or when the old triumphal arches were looking young
again under the smile of the Sabine mountains, a brilliant procession
set the pontifical flagstones ringing under their horses’ hoofs. Look at
these great figures who are passing. Here is the proud Catherine Sforza;
Tebaldeo, the poet skilful in following the forest tracks; Pontanus, the
methodical huntsman, the taciturn philosopher; the pride of Venice, the
sprightly Bembo, somewhat excited, for he wishes to “stick” the boar
and cut off its head, and therewith to do honour to the Virgin of the
woods, “in verses which will go down to posterity.” Here is the fair
Lucretia Borgia, “the glory of her race,” and, in close attendance,
Ercole Strozzi, just writing for her his great poem called _The Chase_, a
medley of venery and politics. Who next? Here is the omnipotent Ascanio
Sforza, vice-chancellor of the Roman church, all impetuosity, full of the
boyish animation which he will retain through the most cruel trials till
that day when he goes to his long rest in the church of Santa Maria del
Popolo. Behind him comes cardinal Adriano Castelli, the witty diplomatist
who wins all hearts, the admirable humanist who is going to celebrate
this chase. These ladies and prelates sing the praises of Diana; it seems
to them that the noble goddess in person is guiding their long cavalcade
among the tombs, in the impressive silence of this great Roman desert
where long aqueducts (odd vegetation!) lend sombre decoration to the
landscape.
Her broidered chlamys she has raised;
Her golden locks float in the breeze,
The purple buskins reach her knees;
Her gilded quiver’s ringing sound
Wakes echoes in the woods around.
Ascanio, courteous, debonair,
Rides close to show her every care;
Collects the troop, on Lybian steeds,
And harks them forth to doughty deeds.
View halloo! The boar is started at the foot of the hills, the hounds are
off, the hunters scatter and gallop up hill and down dale, dogged and
indefatigable. Presently, shouts, bayings, howls of wounded dogs! All is
over. Cardinal Ascanio appears, with flaming eye and flaming cheeks, his
coat red, his knife redder still, near the boar dripping red. This is
the epical, the intoxicating moment. The hounds tumble over each other,
the whippers-in bestir themselves, the hunters come panting up from all
directions. Suddenly all is hushed; as if by magic an exquisite repast
is served; the sweet measured tones of guitars, the voices of singers,
the plaudits of the banqueters alone wake the languid echoes, while huge
flagons of a generous wine go round. Then Cardinal Castelli rises, and
in his elegant Latin recites a Pindaric ode in honour of the victorious
huntsman, “the empurpled senate’s glory and grace.” Nothing could be more
piously orthodox or more delightful than this hunting ode. The Cardinal
recalls how the Redeemer, “true religion’s lord and emperor,” has put
vain deities to flight and given solace to perishing humanity, bringing
life and strength and joy. Ascanio responds with this invocation:
O Dian, virgin goddess of the woods and groves,
Or whether it behoves
To hail Proserpina, light of the glooming sky,
Lucina, Hecate, or e’en
Of the dim nether world the woful queen,
Dictynna else, or Trivia—whosoe’er
Dost to my swinking hours apply
Thy constant care,
Thee in my heart I hold eternally!
Evening creeps on, and the shadows extend. Soon the joyous clatter of
hoofs is re-echoing along the Sacred Way; these are the masters of Rome,
whom the shades of Tiberius and Constantine salute in the darkness.
While at Rome the chase was thus allying itself with poetry, in France,
as may be surmised, it followed no such bent. The good Louis XII.,
ruling with circumspection, would not have been hard put to it to give
his exploits a character of seriousness and tranquillity, for his
health obliged him to hunt in a litter, and more often with hawks than
with hounds; indeed, even at the kennels of Blois the spirit of poetry
modestly crept in; the court poets, not having at their disposal the
Roman mythology, or the shades of Tiberius and Constantine, extolled
the royal hawks and hounds. They honoured with a charming epitaph the
venerable Chailly, doyen of the pack, and a model of probity and honour,
who, after having followed the king even to war, had peacefully finished
his course at the feet of Queen Anne. They sang also of the famous
falcon Muguet, the terror of herons, “little of body but wondrous full
of courage”:
Trois passetemps parfaits a eu Louis douzième:
Triboulet et Chailly, et je fus le troisième.[216]
But all this fine poetry only celebrated the mettlesomeness of the
animals; it did not protect the game from slaughter; it left hunting
with its primitive characteristics, which continued to wound the finer
feelings, and snuffed out the faintest glimmer of the spiritual life.
One man was found, with the heroic determination to reform the French
style of hunting in the Roman direction. This man was Guillaume Budé,
generally known as the founder of the College of France, but as good a
hunter as a Hellenist, and in this regard as worthy of renown.
Budé is a brilliant example of the intellectual development of many men
of his generation. Come of a line of high officials, he went through
the usual experiences: a tutor, fashionable masters, a special Greek
tutor, one George Hermonymos, brought direct from Lacedaemonia to teach
him to lisp the Greek alphabet at the remuneration of five hundred
crowns monthly; but Lefèvre d’Etaples[217] did not succeed in making
a philosopher of him, nor Fra Giocondo[218] a mathematician. Then,
after lolling for a while on the long-suffering benches of the Orleans
University of Law, Budé resigned himself to run in the paternal grooves;
apart from hunting, he was not known to have any accomplishment or
passion except fishing. So he went to Rome as secretary to an embassy
at the time of the election of Julius II. This proved the turning-point
of his life. The aesthetic splendour of Rome struck him and held him
spellbound; he experienced the electric shock, the complete change of
view which the sudden revelation of the spirit of beauty has from all
time occasioned in choice minds. He came back a changed man. He became
an apostle of beauty; he resigned his diplomatic appointments, and his
office as secretary to the king; he even refused a comfortable retreat on
the bench, in order to devote himself to that noble intellectual life,
the radiance of which had filled his soul.
He gave up everything except hunting. And it was then that he had to face
the trying problem that rose in his mind with peculiar intensity—how to
spiritualise the chase.
The solution he arrived at was of the most original kind. He has
communicated it to us in the form of a conversation, real or imaginary,
between himself and King Francis I. This dialogue attained a measure of
popularity; written in Latin (following the Roman fashion), it had the
honour of being translated by the great court translator, Louis Le Roy,
and in our time has been re-published by M. Chevreul.
Budé’s idea was wonderfully simple, and nicely calculated, he thought,
to make an impression on Francis I. The king was not very clever, but he
was very willing to learn, and had great confidence in the new ideas,
particularly those of his friend.
Budé merely suggested the adoption of Latin as the language of venery. At
first sight, Francis did not quite catch the piquancy of this proposal;
however, he made no opposition; and discovered on reflection, indeed,
that it hit the mark admirably. Certain persons were agitating for the
suppression of Latin in law proceedings, with the professed object of
rendering them more comprehensible: here was an excellent means of
silencing the agitators, by showing them that Latin, if it can serve for
the slang of the turf, can serve for anything.
History does not relate whether Francis halloed his hounds in Latin
verse; but the seed dropped by Budé was not lost, and another scholar,
Michelangelo Blando, the commentator on Aristotle and Hippocrates, took
up the same subject as a second study. In a learned Latin treatise on
hunting, Blando shows how important it is for the huntsmen to be men
of literary culture; for their benefit he investigates every branch
of canine lore from the earliest times: breeds, regimen, maladies,
training—on all these points he admirably collects the various threads
of tradition. Nor does he forget the lives of the most illustrious of
hunters down to and including Francis I. Among these, naturally, he makes
honourable mention of a number of noble ladies who were ardent devotees
of the chase, and with whom the sport almost always meant a dedication of
their virginity; for example, the fair Atalanta, who disdained marriage;
Calixto, daughter of a king of Arcadia; Arethusa, daughter of the Centaur
Hippochrome; Amimone, a Breton nymph, daughter of Danaus; and a thousand
other vestals whom it is unnecessary to recall, says he, “being household
words with all hunters worthy of the name.” After such an enumeration,
one might indeed be tempted to believe that, for women at any rate, the
chase elevates the soul and has platonic virtues.
But, all this notwithstanding, the lady artists in charm did not think
it deserved either encouragement or sympathy on their part. In what
respect had this sport any moral efficacy? It had, on the contrary,
the disadvantage of giving a woman a somewhat masculine appearance,
of diluting in her all that constitutes the essence of platonic
sweetness.[219]
Riding to hounds was no longer indulged in, except by some few
over-energetic and rather old-fashioned ladies like Margaret of Austria,
who was so proud of her stuffed wolves’ heads; or Anne of France, a
passionate and classical huntress, whom one of her faithful henchmen, the
seneschal of Normandy, enthusiastically styles the “grand mistress” of
this “glorious trade”; but whom he calls also its last representative.
Anne hunted in the same way that she did everything; coldly and
methodically she with her own eyes examined the trail, and gave the word
to hark forward; then she set off with her dogs, and suddenly warming
to the work, grew animated and vociferous, and smartly handled her
hunting-spear. Such ways as these have caused her to be always wrongly
judged, even by her closest friends, and have given her a reputation for
mannishness, whereas in her heart of hearts she was infinitely feminine,
and femininely philosophic.
The large majority of her contemporaries would have been careful not to
imitate her, and if they resigned themselves to the chase, it was for
some good reason. Personally they went in for little else than hawking.
It was indifferent to them whether men rode out and effected more or less
slaughter; but they loved the associations of the hunt—the delightful
evenings, favourable to flirtation (when the hunters were not too hungry
or sleepy); the succeeding days of tranquillity, when the unconstraint
of country life allowed them to rise early and come down into the fresh
air without stopping to do up their hair or their complexions, but with
clear, rosy cheeks; to hurry through a hunter’s mass, and then start
gossiping in the shade on the respective merits of dogs and birds until
it was time for breakfast. In short, to platonist ladies, the less
hunting there was, the more genuine and admirable the chase appeared. If
men absolutely insisted on spilling blood, why not get it over quickly?
Why not fill their parks with tame stags and one fine morning go out and
massacre a few? But for pity’s sake let there be no more talk of their
Red Indian stratagems, or of competing in instinct with the animals!
“Tell me,” cries Margaret of France, “is the capture of a stag fit work
for a prince?”—he might as well turn mason or hind!
They came to the conclusion that, if they did not wish to live in the
kennel, there was nothing for it but to give up hunting, and this was
more logical than Budé’s or Blando’s attempt to imbue huntsmen with lofty
and fantastic ideas which would never make a good sportsman.
Like all human things, the charming theories we have just indicated
had their dark side. The habit of suppressing nature, of making her
all grace and attractiveness, of embellishing and transfiguring her,
is pretty sure to lead to the loss of any real knowledge of nature. A
landscape is transformed into a drawing-room. Lemaire de Belges and
others discourse to us of nothing but branches gently swaying, rustling
leaflets, the waning autumn, huts in which mock shepherds in sham
goat-skins listen to the moaning of the winter wind with a ravishment
which it is difficult not to fancy humbug too. If only this mawkish
sentimentality always led to the ideal! But no; the coy Phillises sport
their demure little tricks at all hours but the lover’s hour, when
perhaps they would not be out of place.
The fleshly Venetian school, with its feeling for colour and its somewhat
pagan naturalism, much more successfully expressed man’s relations with
Nature. It opens for us not a mere garden bower, but a huge factory of
sensuous pleasure, whence ascend a thousand high-soaring aspirations and
a penetrating effluence. Giorgione and Titian have wonderfully rendered
the poetry of these love-filled horizons. From the smooth sea, or the
foaming billows, or the flowery meadows depicted by their pencils, loud
voices speak to us; and nothing but the old, imaginative mythology is
wanted to personify all the unknowable and unknown unions whence we
feel that the physical world is every day drawing its life and its
overmastering thirst for renewal. The epicureans let themselves drift
along aimlessly, resting on their oars,[220] and do no more than sing
their little part, hardly audible in this colossal orchestration. The
platonists, on the other hand, will not allow themselves to be seduced,
and combat nature even while caressing her, preferring to keep her too
much in subjection rather than to yield her too much obedience. Nature
untamed or sensual would slay man, they think. She is a slave, meant
to be subject to us, meditating revenge, and eager to suck or shed our
blood; and she is set among the slaves.
Finally, a word must be said about a life which held a place
midway between country life and city life, namely, the life of the
watering-places, both inland and by the sea. In France the fashion
was difficult to introduce, good society preferring the large and
comfortable existence of the country house; but to take the waters was
all the rage in Italy.
Except at church, there was no scene where people could better meet
together, or take one another more seriously without hypocrisy. A
public bath represented the ideal of equality. You go in, cut a figure,
and come out again, and Jack is as good as his master. It is an open
drawing-room, in which people who elsewhere are strangers to one another,
acquaintances, and bosom friends all have one idea—to distil their soul
drop by drop into the ears of kindred spirits, like the neighbouring
spring.
The difficulty with which the custom became acclimatised in France has
been attributed to very various causes. Following an old tradition, many
preachers so late as the 16th century inveighed against the habit of
bathing. Out of thirty women who go bathing, says one, not one can call
herself pure. “O fatal laving, prolific in elements of death!” exclaims
another. “Ye women who stew yourselves,” says Oliver Maillard,[221] “I
summon you all to the stewpots of Hell!” The Calvinists went to still
greater lengths of indignation, and more than one physician, even,
thought well to adopt a cautious attitude. At the end of a long treatise
on hygiene, Gazius says: “I have still to speak about the baths, and I
shall do so briefly, for the custom of bathing does not exist among us,
and further, it is a pleasure which is not devoid of danger; perhaps it
would be better not to speak of it, lest I should appear to recommend
it. For myself, I have never taken a bath, and I am none the worse for
it, thank God!” However, Gazius, not to come to logger-heads with the
ancients, or the Arabs, or his colleagues, goes so far as to acknowledge
that cold water is in use “in very distinguished countries”; for his
part, he sees nothing objectionable in a douche followed by brisk
friction or massage.
But we must get to the bottom of this matter, a question of morals rather
than hygiene.
We have unexpectedly come upon principles which we recognise as old
acquaintances. Neither preachers nor Calvinists were willing to admit
that any consideration of utility could induce a self-respecting woman
to strip herself of all, or nearly all, her clothes, either in the open
air as in ancient times, or in one of those public bathing establishments
which were cried every day in the market-places between the artichokes
and the cheese,[222] and where the authorities winked at certain
familiarities. Many historians have concluded outright that Calvinists
and preachers had a horror of water; but this is not strictly accurate;
they recommended baths at home. Thus the council of Basle passed a canon
inviting persons to set bath-rooms in their houses. The platonists fell
in the more heartily with the council’s recommendation in that they
treated their bodies with sacerdotal attentions, so to speak, and that
no refinement appeared to them unreasonable in forging the weapon of
delightful love. Some discriminating women preferred dry methods to
water—powders, pastes, scraping of the skin, which enabled them to say
“that they did not wash their hands”; but the majority owed a great
deal to water, and the room devoted to this work of regeneration was a
sanctuary. The little bath-rooms of the 18th or the beginning of the 19th
century, hung all round with mirrors, are familiar to us. The idolatry of
the 16th century was less blatant but not less ardent; Raphael himself
decorated Bibbiena’s bath-room, and, as we know, the subject chosen by
the charming prelate for his frescoes was the story of Venus and Cupid.
In one of her most amusing letters Madame de Sévigné bewails the
necessity of taking shower-baths at Vichy, which she regarded as a
“humiliating” situation to be in. To give herself courage, she conceived
the singular idea of keeping her two maids with her, so that she might
“see familiar faces.” At the same time, she got her physician, a man of
parts, to conceal himself behind a curtain, so that she might chat with
him during the operation.
We do not know what the impressions of Madame de Sévigné’s descendants
are, but we know that her ancestresses were on this point extremely
fastidious. Margaret of France, not to lose sight of the story of the
chaste Susanna, had it embroidered on a table-cover.
We get an idea, then, of the cautious attitude adopted in regard to
hydrotherapeutics. But on the other hand the friends of antiquity
restored water to a place of honour; scholars proved that the Romans had
been devoted to it; the higher clergy became its apostles. George of
Amboise and his brothers multiplied the spas at Rouen, Blois, Gaillon,
Clermont, as the pope did at Rome.
In regard to mineral springs, there appeared, under the auspices of the
pope and the Venetian senate, a large folio official guide,[223] which
explained that there were waters for all sick bodies as there were saints
for all sick souls,[224] but that no one should venture to them without
seeking advice in the proper quarter.
A person wishing to go to the waters would consult a physician. If he was
a specialist like Savonarola, he would look at everything with aquatic
prepossessions, and commence his patient’s initiation at home with baths
of various kinds—baths of oil, of wine, of milk, of fire, of compressed
air. One fine morning he would announce that mineral waters were spoilt
in transit, that he was tired of making the patient drink stale water,
and he would then dispatch him to some natural spring.
Most of the Italian springs, at any rate such as were much frequented,
had the good taste to flow in or near a city, and thus people were
likely to meet familiar faces, if only among the regular visitors. Under
Louis XII., the city of Genoa revolted because its French captain,
the Sire de Roquebertin, instead of attending to business, tiresome
certainly, passed his life at the waters of Acqui.
A lady of distinction, however, first of all secured a good escort to
keep her company; Margaret of France, for instance, carried her whole
party off to Cauterets. Then she had to listen to the parting exhortation
of her doctor, a punctilious and intelligent man, who apparently had
no excessive confidence in his colleagues or his fair client, and who
catechised her and made her read the folio. He mentioned eight enemies
lying in wait for her—headache, insomnia, and the rest;—he instructed
her how, by watchfully studying her little secret vices and never for a
moment forgetting her digestion, and so on, she would put them to rout.
Then he carefully consulted the horoscope, the direction of the wind,
the temperature, his chart of epidemics; he assured himself as to the
character of the year (for there were some years in which the waters
killed off the invalids or made them worse), and finally he pronounced
the _exeat_.
Flinging off this wet blanket with his terrestrial visions, the patient
sped away. Pity if it was towards Porretta, near Bologna, a very popular
haunt but dreadfully purgative. However, the spirit of Beauty can
idealise everything, and an agreeable poet, Battista of Mantua, undertook
to show all the moral and aesthetic satisfaction to be got in drinking
three glasses of a laxative water, and then leaving Nature to herself.
He describes this regimen in admirable verses:
“Far from the bed and all its joys,
You go and come and eke advance
In the slow measure of a stately dance,”
and so on.
In fact, the idea of becoming young again, the thought of gaining new
freedom of mind, new warmth of heart, new suppleness of the bodily frame
by sacrifices so slight, of seeing the wrinkles vanish of themselves,
in short the pursuit of beauty as a bounden duty, threw the glamour of
poetry over many things, and was well worth the self-imposition of
twenty-one days of hardship. For all that, fashionable people preferred
the bathing-places to the spas.
Life at such places presented the admirable advantage that people
could there enjoy the most perfect liberty. Nowhere were there better
opportunities for seeing one’s friends, for intimate conversation, for
deriving real profit from companionship. It was that which made this
life so precious. A man who had followed in the train of the princess he
loved had absolutely nothing to do but to devote himself to her, for he
put up with the rubbings and purgings only as a sop to his conscience.
What delightful opportunities between two glasses of water to improve
the mind or tell stories! Many collections of _Novelli_ originated near
a spring. It was during a season at Lucca, in April 1538, that Vittoria
Colonna made the acquaintance of Carnesecchi, the adventurous theologian,
and launched out with him into the abstrusest religious speculations.
Everyone followed his own bent, and the gentlemen who did not love
husbands were less irked there than elsewhere.
We shall not go so far as to say that platonism exercised undivided sway
over the bathers;[225] but to have a place at all was something gained.
There is no indication that a much purer virtue reigned north of the Alps
among the virtuous races. The goings-on at Baden in Aargau scandalised
even Brantôme. A Florentine,[226] who thought life at Florence pleasant
enough, has related his impressions at Baden with a naïve stupefaction;
he was dumbfounded the very moment he arrived. The beautiful platonism of
his own province, flanked always by jealous husbands and _impedimenta_
of all sorts, appeared to him mere food for babes, a phantom, a faded
flower, an unsubstantial pageant, beside those Piccadilly manners. But
they did not offend him: “Bravo!” he cries, “who wouldn’t be platonic,
since Plato preaches the community of women? Here the husbands take
everything, absolutely everything, in good part! How wonderfully sensible
of them! These Germans don’t rack themselves for suspicions, they enjoy
the present.” And then, Florentine as he is, he goes on to describe
the charms of Baden with genuine enthusiasm: the handsome streets in
which never a sign of infirmity is to be seen (Baden was recommended to
childless women); exquisite fine ladies; men in cloth of gold and silver;
somewhat exotic beauties sprung from God knows where, attended by a
lackey and one or two waiting-maids; here and there a few noble abbesses
of reasonable piety.... What a whirl! It is one mad race for pleasure!
Serious people who take care of themselves and desire a cure, have two or
three baths a day, living like so many ducks. For ordinary folk there are
common swimming-baths of wonderful picturesqueness, but every respectable
hostel possesses one bath for men, and another for women, with a gallery
to which men are admitted in their dressing-gowns. To describe the gaiety
that reigns there is impossible. There is chatting and laughter, eating
and drinking, dancing in a ring; the gentlemen fling down coins which
the fair bathers catch with the tips of their fingers or in their linen
chemisettes, with much contortioning and struggling. Sometimes, when the
company are on intimate terms, they end by fraternising in a single tank,
which is much more amusing, and pleases the physicians, because nothing
ensures more conscientious bathing. _Honi soit qui mal y pense!_
In the evening a broad meadow serves as a casino; there is more dancing
and singing: and these amusements are mingled with various pastimes
such as the game of _balle à grelots_,[227] which leads to all sorts of
horse-play.
That is Baden.
One singular fact is brought out. Platonism was regarded as nothing if
not complex and elaborate, and indeed it believed itself to be such;
antiplatonism, on the contrary, affected airs of the most complete
simplicity: yet whenever the two are confronted, it is platonism that
proves the more ingenuous.
CHAPTER V
INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES
It is all very well for a woman to be beautiful, to lend grace to the
world, to diffuse sweetness and light; but this would be but a vain show
if she did not with jealous care nourish in herself the flame of love of
the Beautiful. Castiglione, who liked to give a mathematical precision
to his definitions, tells us: “Woman must nourish herself on the life
of the world and the life of the arts”—thus in appearance relegating
the aesthetic life to a second place; but he is very careful to add:
“She must occupy herself with literature, music, painting, dancing,
and entertaining”; in other words, the heart must reverse the parts,
and in the conscience secret preoccupations must come before visible
occupations, His view is logical. How could women govern the world if
they were in reality its slaves? The first necessity for a lighthouse is
a light.
Further, we ourselves have a right to ask where these ladies think of
leading us. Their art consists in pleasing us and in indoctrinating us
with their principles. To please is their secret, with which we do not
meddle; it is of little consequence to know if Lucretia Borgia cut out
her own dresses, where and by whom Mary Stuart had her hats made, or if
women always please by what pleases their husbands. But when they speak
of ruling our intelligence, it becomes of very great importance to know
how they will deal with us.
The intellectual provision of the Renaissance women consisted chiefly
of impressions of art, in accordance with Castiglione’s prescription.
In this, painting (still more the inferior manual arts—lace-making,
embroidery, tapestry) held the lowest rank, on the principle
universally accepted in the platonic world that the less an art needs
the co-operation of the senses to touch the soul, the greater is its
excellence. Music stood higher than painting, because it directly
transmits an impression; vocal music in particular represents almost
the speech of soul to soul, with but an insignificant admixture of
materiality. Poetry was the supreme art, the truly aristocratic thing; no
one would have dreamt of comparing it to painting or any manual art. The
poet with one stroke paints soul and body; in Ronsard’s words, “he paints
in the heavens.”
To lay in her stock of happiness, a woman will begin by living in close
communion with the Beautiful. Sciences are useless to her; she has little
taste, and still less time, for their cultivation. But just as she finds
breakfast a necessity, so she ought every morning to give her soul
nourishment, if it be only one sip of the beautiful. Louise of Savoy on
rising used to read a psalm, “to perfume her day,” as she put it. These
few moments’ reading were sufficient to flood her soul with a radiance to
light her through the day.
Further, reading is a duty having special claims on women. Not only is
there always some new thing to learn, some new chord to touch, but the
intellectual life demands a constant outgoing of energy,—I will venture
to say, a continual “education.” Could a tree flourish and bear fruit if
it refused to suck up its sap? How long would it be before it stood a
bare skeleton against the sky?
Thus, with complete independence of mind, as great as her material
liberty but much more difficult to acquire, a woman will supply herself
with spiritual food; she will seek Beauty in truth stripped of all
conventions. The real foe to women’s freedom is not this or that man,
but themselves, because of their frivolity, their inconsequence, and
their innate passion for the superficial; in other words, for the
conventional or fashionable. They need a real force of soul to go deeply
into anything; they are perfectly happy in yielding to the glitter of
a thought which, though obscure at bottom, is dazzling on the surface.
When the taste for precision has not been carefully instilled into them
in childhood, they run a great risk of wasting their minds in habits of
cursory curiosity, like many men of the world.
Books played a prominent part in the psychology of the Renaissance. They
were regarded as the highest type of luxury; a house was characterised as
much by its library as by its plate. Among the ladies, Anne of Brittany,
Louise of Savoy, and many others are essentially deserving of the name of
bibliophiles, nobly loving the beautiful books with beautiful miniatures
produced for them. They were even accused of reading them. In that epoch,
the artistic aroma exhaled from a fine edition seemed necessarily to
accentuate the written thought, just as music accentuated the uttered
thought. We have become wiser; we have discovered that beautiful books
are herbariums in which ideas must be left to dry, for their better
preservation.
There was no lack of scoffers to make mock of this “bookish sufficiency.”
“What a heap of books!... These folk must surely mean to carry the world
on their backs! What a frittering away of intellectuality!” And, indeed,
Margaret of France not only believed in books, but doted on them; to her
a library seemed a sanctuary.
“Tant y en a que le seul remembrer
Et les nommer n’est pas en ma puissance,
Mais il faisoit beau voir leur ordonnance ...
Et du scavoir qui est dedans
J’en laisse aux folz craindre les accidens ...
Des livres fiz ung pillier, et sembloit
Que sa grandeur terre et ciel assembloit.”[228]
We writers think it natural enough that people should buy our books,
keep them, and even cut a few pages; if it is women who show us this
attention, we do not complain. We dig away in darkness under the soil,
labouring like a miner with his pick; why should we complain that above
us, in the bright sunshine, someone sifts and mints our metal, and
circulates part of it through the world?
It is even a not wholly disagreeable surprise to meet in an odd place
here and there one’s own ideas, which have flitted away and found warm
foster-parents in people who have so far adopted them as to believe them
their own. Sometimes it is another writer who is good enough to saddle
himself with them thus, and in that case our feeling is not perhaps
unalloyed pleasure; but if it is a reader, man or woman, we are well
rewarded. Often, too, our idea as it goes round has altered in feature,
and if it now and then appears to us enfeebled, it also happens sometimes
to have gained strength.
Everyone cannot be a writer! ‘Amateurs’ have a rôle of their own, which
is not that of ‘stickit’ authors—a rôle of synthesis, generalisation,
criticism, support, sanction!
The end we pursue—thought, namely, and truth—can only be attained by the
aid of conversation,—only if distinguished and enthusiastic women set
themselves to distil from our books any good they may contain, and to
diffuse its essence around them.
From this almost indispensable collaboration between pure learning
and its popular interpretation results a vigorous life. As Madame
d’Haussonville has so well said: “An eager desire for knowledge possessed
the entire sixteenth century. The quick and supple intellect of the women
was carried away in the general current. Erudition was the passion of
the age, not that cold and microscopic erudition which arises in ages
of decadence, and which is often only the useless lumber of scholastic
pedantry, but an erudition living, intelligent, and animated”—animated,
that is by aestheticism.
By the side of exquisites like Bembo, laborious students like Lefèvre
d’Etaples, Hebraists, and exegetists cultivating their little patch with
dogged tenacity, there were brilliant minds, perhaps more brilliant
than profound, but unprejudiced, who synthetised particular studies and
started them on an unlooked-for career. For the Hebraists, exegetists,
philosophers, and historians of every description, the spread of
intelligence would of course have been fatal; but it was the _raison
d’être_ of a lady whose mission was to put in circulation the results of
her individual study.
Thus the aim which women had to set before themselves in their reading
was twofold: first, a personal, aesthetic aim, the reinvigoration and
refreshment of their own souls; secondly, an aim relating to their
apostolic mission, the art of understanding men’s souls, then of
charming and leading them by means of conversation.
But it is impossible, by merely scanning a man’s bookshelves, to form
an idea of the man. In great houses, the king’s, for example, some of
the books were inherited, others were presents, others were books that
no gentleman’s library could have been without. Francis I. bought the
Italian novelties, Bembo, Pontanus, and Politian. In reality his chief
reading was the Arthurian romances.
The princesses had also, besides the books of the hour, books that
they had been obliged to buy or accept, books left to them—those which
were kept “for their backs,” as Montaigne said. The bookshelves made
a brilliant display in a spacious gallery adorned with the choicest
objects of art. The bulk of the library usually consisted of books on the
elements of religion, history, and morals; it also contained romances,
poetry, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and books with engravings, which too often
replaced those charming manuscripts of which Louise of Savoy was one of
the last protectors.
The books that were read were treatises on history, especially Roman
history, and on practical medicine.[229] But custom varied.
Certain ladies, like Anne of France, browsed on the early fathers, the
philosophers, and the moralists. Many, while loving studies of this kind
and calling themselves highly philosophic, preferred to have their food
peptonised, and to be furnished with ready-made convictions which only
required ventilating and disseminating in conversation. A number of
Italian treatises proffered themselves for this little service, the best
of which was Castiglione’s book, _The Courtier_. To name Castiglione is
to name the Bible of platonism, the code of aestheticism, the Machiavelli
of anti-machiavelism; Castiglione was in the hands of every woman who
meditated on the ideal.
From a purely aesthetic standpoint the classics were in favour, except
Virgil, to whom only the Mantuans remained faithful, probably from
local feeling. Ovid, who speaks so well and so much about women, ranked
very high. He had been popularised in France by the translations of
Octovien de Saint-Gelais and André de la Vigne; illustrated editions went
off rapidly, even though the engravings were old. In the very highest
artistic spheres, people swore by Cicero.[230] In Margaret of France’s
circle the favourite names were Terence and Cicero, Castiglione and
Boccaccio.
On the reading days, which were principally (we are bound to say) the
grey days of existence, when one feels abandoned by God and men, when
one is left to “one’s own devices,” people rather sought for light
entertainment, if possible gently emotional, or at any rate lively,
cheering, affecting. The Bible was very useful for getting glimpses of
Heaven without having to run to a monk or a parson, for an intelligent
woman cared for nothing lower than a bishop. If they wanted psychology,
they went to poetry, novels, romances. A mere sonnet, a little story,
very short but with movement and savour, would suffice to cure a casual
fit of dumps; in more complicated cases they took up some voluminous
romance, which engrossed the attention for long hours and reflected life
for the nonce in warm and sunny hues.
The literature of the Renaissance was well provided with _Nouvelles_ and
_Facéties_, answering all the demands for spiced and piquant reading made
even by the platonist ladies.
They revelled in such works with no touch of coyness; it was a mark of
breeding to discuss them, laugh at them, and quote from them. Often some
courtly abbé, the spiritual director of these ladies, and soon to be a
full-blown bishop, undertook explanation or translation.
Some persons have questioned whether the custom of reading narratives
so strongly spiced did not in the long run obliterate the moral sense,
especially among women. Brantôme maintains that this was the cause of
all moral obliquities. Margaret of France did not believe it; her faith
in art was so ardent that she regarded it as a proof of mental vigour to
face all sorts of literature without blenching. Her friend Marot told her
so with a smile, for in the contest between flesh and spirit he held
with the flesh; he mentions a select list of the works reputed the most
naughty, and adds:
Tout cela est bonne doctrine,
Et n’y a rien de deffendu![231]
Margaret, brought up on Saint-Gelais and Boccaccio, was in truth
inoculated. Further, like some other women of narrow mysticism, she was
not afraid of contrasts;—soul and body in opposite pans of the scale,
Petrarch as a corrective to Boccaccio, and vice versa. Good humour and
gaiety were part of the platonist hygiene, and ladies took them where
they found them. Coarse pleasantries did not amuse, as a German[232]
who had spent great pains in writing a _Eulogy of Baldness_ frankly
confessed. “We are ridiculous even when we write of serious things, but
we are never gay. When we try to be jocular it is, in the words of the
proverb, like setting an elephant to dance.” Professed humorous writers
are such bores!—a crusty old philosopher like Nifo, to wit, or that
excellent La Perrière, a friend of Margaret, who dedicated his lascivious
verses, his _Hundred Considerations of Love_, to a clerk in the Woods and
Forests!
There was no help for it, ladies had to return to Boccaccio, since
amusement was his monopoly! The chance discovery of a by no means
remarkable unpublished fragment of Boccaccio covered Claricio of Imola
with glory, and was published at the expense of a Milanese Maecenas,
Andrea Calvi, under the auspices of Leo X. and Francis I. Castiglione
and Margaret were not disposed to attack such a renown: their ambition
was to eclipse it. Margaret had a fresh translation of Boccaccio made.
She herself, as we know, was ambitious to imitate the master; and to
do so was really a profitable business: by donning Boccaccio’s mantle
Firenzuola became a dignitary of the church, and Bandello became bishop
of Nérac; while a common saddler, Nicolas, gained the favour of the king.
The test of skill was to tell true stories under transparent pseudonyms.
Yet Louise of Savoy was almost as fond of the Acts of the Apostles.
The Facétie had a less brilliant fate. Poggio and Cornazano, always
dear to the ladies, handed down many of their stories to imitators like
Domenichi, Delicado, Boistuau, who in their turn passed them on to
Shakespeare, La Fontaine, and others.
The old romance continued in high favour—a favour that was so far
merited in that the romance combined with the sentimentalism of chivalry
sufficient spiciness to induce a good lady to leave it lying on her
table. Women doted on the venerable romance of cloak and sword,[233]
long, diffuse, and heroic; it had long ago captured Italy. It delighted
princesses by its idealism, and peasant girls by its flavour of mystery
and marvel. When the efflorescence of humanism, aestheticism and the new
ideas was at its height, the _Romaunt of the Rose_ made its reappearance,
and year in, year out men saw defiling past, as though resuscitated by
some terrible incantation, all the old knights of ecstatic or sorrowful
countenance, the champions of the Holy Grail and of Melusina—Lancelot of
the Lake and Perceforest, Fier-à-bras and Percival, Ponthus, Meliadus,
Pierre de Provence, all that Gothic world which was believed to be dead
and buried. With them they brought their friends and relatives—_The Fair
Elaine_, _Theseus_, _The Destruction of Troy_, _The Doughty Hector_,
_Oedipus_, _Alexander the Great_, these worthy, up to a certain point, of
rubbing shoulders with Plato; but also _Baudouin_, _Le Grant Voyage de
Jherusalem_, _La Conqueste de Trébisonde_, in an age when people troubled
themselves very little about Crusades! Even the Italians went mad over
Charlemagne. It was like an electric spark—a reciprocal attraction.
France lost her heart to Italy, and Italy opened wide her arms to France;
the women of the south, the men of the north. In vain did the platonist
men ridicule the event; in vain did their spokesman, Pulci, at the court
of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the sanctuary of platonism, empty the vials of
their wrath and give the paladins a terribly hot time of it; nothing
could stem the tide, and a romance—a shockingly bad one—entitled _I reali
di Francia_, became the germ of a whole new literature.
Men succumbed to this craze because the women drove them to it. Besides,
nations, like widows, love the dear departed. Since chivalry had
ceased to exist, people naturally swore by nothing else. The more our
activities decline, the more we gloat over the memory of past excesses.
Charlemagne, then, filled the horizon; doting looks were cast at rusty
old sword-blades, and while works of quite charming beauty left women
almost unmoved, spectres had only to appear, to vanquish them. Sometimes
these showed themselves naked and unadorned, in all the strange dignity
of their powerful frames; at other times an intelligent editor paid some
attention to their toilet, smartened them up, decked them with little
rosettes of pink or blue. How many times was _Amadis_, perhaps the most
famous of these romances, thus tittivated! No one remembered that France
had given it birth; it was re-imported into France by way of Spain and
Italy through a translation of Herberay des Essarts, with fabulous
success: “Any one who spoke ill of the Amadis romances would have been a
hissing and a by-word.” Out of four books it grew into a dozen; it might
well have lengthened itself indefinitely, like some law-suits in our own
time.
These old romances are to-day scarcely known except by scholars. If we
open any one of them at hazard—_Lancelot of the Lake_ for instance, one
of the most classic[234]—we find that the colouring is crude. Side by
side with mystic virginities we see the reek of coarse appetites. Wives
and maidens have blood in their veins, and, like all persons of rather
primitive education, do nothing by halves; her husband has only to turn
his back for a moment and queen Guinevere is feeling her way towards a
reconciliation with Lancelot (bearded like the pard), and the gallant
knight has no need to supplicate to get the window opened. Sir Gawain
holds very brief parley with the daughter of the king of North Wales,
when he surprises her extended on her ermine couch in a virginal but
ravishing deshabille! Arthur very quickly forgets Queen Guinevere amid
the solace brought him in his cell by a damsel “courteous and fair of
speech.”
As it mixed in the best platonist society, the old romance of chivalry
picked up more refined manners. King Arthur ends by gathering about him a
noble enough company; Roland leaves Charlemagne in the lurch, to hasten
after his well-beloved; and (horror of horrors!) Angelica philanders
prettily with a Saracen page! The old torrential romance ended like the
Rhone—fell into a tranquil lake.
And yet the dignitaries of the church invariably denounced it, and had
the courage to break with the women on this point. They countenanced
neither the old masters nor the new—the eloquent Cataneo, the gay
Boiardo. Nothing disarmed their opposition—neither the success of
romances like _La Célestine_,[235] nor blandishments. When Ariosto
offered to Cardinal d’Este his masterpiece packed with dithyrambs in
honour of all the Estes past, present, and to be, the amiable prelate
said to him: “Where on earth did you get all this nonsense?”[236]
In short, women who read, read what spoke of love: that was what they
set store by. Philosophy spoke of love—they were philosophers; romances,
facéties, novels, poetry spoke of love—they sipped also of that
philosophy. But in some cases it was philosophy that bred the spirit
of love, in other cases it was the spirit of love that led them to
philosophy; and from this wide differences resulted.
The first class were coldly sentimental,—but no real sway is exerted
through coldness; they lived in the absolute,—but the absolute lends no
governing force. They lost touch with things, they had nothing of the
communicable warmth which makes apostles. They were princesses, sacred
beings, to be admired but not touched.
Plato had not evolved a practical rule for happiness, and his best
friends agreed that his social ideas presented many chimerical sides.
But the ladies who learnt their philosophy from love were the ardent,
active women who knew that the world is swayed by passions, good or bad,
and that the secret of feminine power lies far more in that than in any
amount of reasoning. Reason may produce an artless blissfulness, but
passion has lynx eyes. Love is not reasoned out or manufactured, it is
a give and take; life also is only a perpetual exchange, and happiness
comes from life, while Plato seeks it in self-contemplation and egoism.
To act on another, one must be acted on; to make others happy we must
gain happiness through others. An illogical process? What if it is?
Nothing is more illogical and more relative than happiness, since it has
to do with us. That is for many women the science of life, and they love
romances as a pictorial philosophy—not cold precept, but a living force—a
philosophy in which the heart cries out instead of patiently suffering
dissection.
Books appealed to the feelings. Poggio tells the story of a worthy man,
a merchant and a Milanese, and therefore doubly unemotional, who almost
died of grief after reading about the death of Roland: yet Roland had
been dead seven hundred years! Much more were women justified in showing
their sensibility!
So, when they read, they attached the highest value to the external forms
which produce impressions: they were affected more by these than by
ideas. The wife of Guillaume Budé declared that she loved her husband’s
books, not for their contents, but because she regarded them as his
offspring. Women adored magnificence of expression—the rhetoric, the
rhythm, the “gay trimmings” of style; poetry seemed to them the supreme
enchantment, because it answered at once to their personal craving for
“sensibility” and to their mission, which consisted precisely in sowing
a little charm in life, that is, in garnishing life externally with a
little poetry.
However, what they called poetry we should rather call music. Poetry in
those days was only a perpetual libretto; there was rhythm and cadence in
the arrangement of the words, and the impression they gave was a musical
one. Perfect clearness was not insisted on; the thought was allowed to
remain in semi-obscurity, like a melody flowing uncertainly through a
strain of music, rather betrayed than revealed by the harmony. Our great
Lamartine, with his lofty but indefinite thought, has been regarded
even by us as the first of poets. On the other hand, the aim of musical
melody was boldly to seize all these words, to give them a precise
value, intensity, brilliance, and force. The employment chiefly, or
indeed exclusively, of human voices brought this quality still further
into prominence; the delicate modulations of the voice, thrown out with
matchless skill, seemed to outline the very soul of the singer, like
traceries against the sky.
The admirable inspirations of Vittoria and her predecessors will never
cease to touch us. In that old idealistic music there lies a whole
intangible world; our vows, our love, our poignant sorrows, our prayers
gush forth in it like a fountain, flash like a bursting rocket in the
sky: “God has given us nothing more pleasant, nothing more sweet,”
exclaimed a poet: “music is a messenger from heaven, the solace of all
our woes.”[237]
The sonnets of Petrarch were set to music and sung; they had indeed been
composed for that purpose. Teodoro Riccio furnished an accompaniment
to the famous romance, _Italia mia_, and Ciprian van Rore one to the
sonnet, _Fontana di dolore, Albergo d’ira_. Ronsard, too, wrote his
sonorous rhymes for music; Baïf, as is well known, went so far as to
propose to turn writing into a sort of notation, and when his academy
was instituted, composers of music and even mere singers were admitted
on equal footing with poets. The art of music consisted in giving to
thought all the external beauty of which it was capable. Philosophers
counted metrical music (in other words, poetry) or vocal music as a part
of philosophy. The art thus intellectualised became quite a religion. In
his painting of Parnassus at the Vatican, Raphael shows us Apollo singing
like an ancient bard. In all the pictures of Paradise that we have seen
we have never found a palette, or a sculptor’s point, or even a rostrum
or an inkstand; nothing but direct and pure communion with God through
contemplation and music. And what could be more delicious than the little
choirs of angels which Giovanni Bellini’s imagination placed at the feet
of his Madonnas, like an incense of homage from the world! Melozzo gives
a queen an organ as her emblem,[238] and Titian one to his Venuses. Music
would seem to have been the very breath of happiness.
The common people themselves were strangely enamoured of intellectual
harmonies. In Italy a number of poets spent their life in the
market-places, like Homer. Aurelio Brandiolini, for example, who sang in
the squares of Verona the praises of antique heroes, went on, stimulated
by popular applause, to execute veritable _tours de force_, such as
singing in verse the thirty-seven books of Pliny’s _Natural History_. The
celebrated Bernardo Accolti wandered from town to town giving recitals
in the principal squares. The moment he arrived, people flocked about
him, business was suspended, far-distant shops were shut, lights began to
appear on the balconies, and the police hastened up to keep order. Making
way through the crowd by favour, the notables formed up round the poet
as a guard of honour; and then, under the lamp of some sleeping Madonna,
amid breathless silence, the poet’s voice arose towards the starry sky,
singing love to the accompaniment of a guitar.
Nothing more truly characterises the period than this popular passion for
musicians, poets, and buffoons. Far from becoming degraded by contact
with the mob, poetry seemed thereby to gain in breadth. A pure Virgilian
named Andrea Marone (Virgil’s surname) never felt at ease unless sitting
on a stone post; in that position inspiration seized him like an ancient
sibyl or a fakir; his veins dilated, drops of sweat stood on his brow,
his whole being expressed itself in gestures which gave emphasis to his
song, lightning flashed from his eyes; it seemed as though a part of his
individuality left him and shed itself upon his audience like a rain of
fire.
Almost all women were fond of music, for men were very accessible to
ear-charming sound. Even in France, in spite of the poverty of aesthetic
education, the villages harboured a surprising number of harpists and
taborers. The duchess of Orleans patronised at Blois a crowd of more or
less official “gitternists,” fiddlers, and trumpeters, without reckoning
strolling guitarists, always sure of a warm welcome. Like all the
princesses she had her private band, and also two taborers, magnificent
in their crimson badge,—so magnificent that during her lyings-in she had
them to play at the foot of her bed. It was a great sorrow to her to have
to dismiss, from a prudent motive of economy, the ducal choir and even
one of the taborers; Pierre de Vervel, once her master of music, always
remained her friend.
We have in a former volume shown Louise of Savoy, a cithara in her hand,
surrounded by a harp, an organ, and a complete orchestra. Louise Labé
approved of young girls devoting to music the best part of their time.
It was incomprehensible how any lady who possessed this divine means of
fascination[239] could neglect it; when a Mademoiselle de Hauteville had
to be pressed to display her magnificent voice, her false modesty was
censured as a sort of professional error. Mary of England, accompanying
herself on a guitar, used to sing of a morning to Louis XII., her
doddering old husband, and the poor prince felt himself revived, such
“wondrous pleasure did he take therein.” Margaret of France, who has left
us thousands of verses, evidently betook herself to poetry as nowadays we
go to the piano, to let her thoughts wander at large; instead of singing
with her lips, she sang with her pen. It is highly probable that many
ladies abandoned themselves thus to their inspirations, half music, half
poetry.
Sometimes people had too much of it. It was irritating to meet certain
people perpetually humming a refrain. As soon as you entered a
drawing-room, you saw an instrument looming menacingly before you, and
you had to perform. And then, how many amateurs would do better to muzzle
themselves than to go quavering out their little songs!
Music also was charged with enervating effects; some went so far as to
call it an art of decadence, and maintained that the ancient Medes had
perished through love of music. Castiglione almost gets into a passion
on this subject. “What! Music effeminating! But, I ask you, were not
Alexander, Socrates, Epaminondas, Themistocles musicians? Lycurgus was
almost one! Did the harp prevent Achilles from shedding blood—if that is
what you are driving at? Effeminating! Why, without music how can you
praise God? What would comfort the sunburnt labourer at his plough, the
peasant woman at her wheel, the sailor in the storm, the traveller on
his weary way, the nurse in her tiring night-watches by a cradle? Music,
on the contrary, is the charm of life—its light, its sunny grace! No
art responds better to the demands of our emotional nature, none more
liberally brings us vivid and various impressions. It softens, calms,
penetrates us, it moves, indeed enraptures us; it raises us to heaven
with the rapid, vehement, urgent beating of its wings!”
Castiglione almost regards music as love itself: they were to him such
nearly related terms that we cannot be sure but that in his opinion song
was more excellent than love.
In regard to what was expected of it, namely, a little happiness, music
was a performance of feeling rather than of skill. Notes a little
venturesome or even imperfect were pardoned if they blended, and had
resonance and passion. People would boldly attack and smoothly carry to
its conclusion a two-part fugue. The ideal was to hear in a drawing-room
a pure and mellow voice, supported by a single lute; or rather to see the
voice, for the lute, not an ungraceful instrument like the piano, seemed
a living thing, and became one body with the fair singer; it was one
personality thrilling with song.
To idealists of the very highest order, Flemish, French, and German
music was far superior to Italian music, because it expressed ideas,
whilst Italian music barely went beyond sentiment or even sensation. Rome
herself fell a willing victim to the northern races.[240] Among many
distinguished and often admirable artists, the great figure of John of
Ockeghem,[241] who died at Tours in 1495, stands out as that of the old
master who more than anyone else ennobled his art.
His successor, Josquin Desprez, a Fleming trained in the same school
(the very name of which has been lost in the loss of its tradition), and
a member of the choir of Sixtus IV., became a Roman by adoption, and
only left Rome in 1508 to proceed to Ferrara. Josquin was a stickler for
correctness and perfection, skilful in linking discords and in combining
independent parts. From the dim arcana of a sanctuary his profound
inspiration rose into the clear light of day, blossoming out in soft and
brilliant colours. His phrases are like many-coloured curves of light
shot into space, describing their several parabolas without confusion and
without clashing; there is white and green and red, but they all spring
from the same flame.
Many Italians censured, as fit for dreamers and doctrinaires, the
exclusive employment of the human voice. They wished to have at least one
instrument: the bass viol (developed into our violoncello), or the viol,
from which the famous Amati, about 1540, derived the violin. It is a viol
that Raphael places in the hands of his singers, who seem to identify
themselves with the instrument with a passionate ardour.[242]
In the smaller courts chamber-music was cultivated. Happy states! Nothing
took precedence of the quest for a good musician; dilettantism reigned
supreme. The court of Ferrara was practically a conservatoire; it had a
celebrated orchestra, from which Caesar Borgia borrowed violinists when
starting for France. Care was taken that the performance of music should
take place in the most favourable circumstances and amid the profoundest
respect; there was no question of being stacked in a hall, too hot or too
cold, of being tight wedged and sitting askew to hear music by the hour.
Lorenzo Costa depicts a very different concert-hall. Peacefully reclining
on a grassy lawn, beneath the shade of light-foliaged trees, sheltered
from sun and breeze, the ladies form the centre; they are discoursing
of pure love. Their own sweetness seems to envelop everything. They are
crowning a lamb or an ox with flowers; the landscape seems to spread
life out into almost boundless space, intersected by a sheet of limpid
water as blue as the sky. In the middle some persons are unobtrusively
performing music or writing verses. No one pays any attention (so
profound is the spell!) to a troop of soldiers in the distance repelling
an incursion, nor to a handsome chevalier, a solitary and elegant figure,
occupied in daintily killing a reptile, nor to certain groups which have
wandered away beneath the leafy shade, towards the extreme verge of
platonism.
Purely instrumental music, the music of a full orchestra, appealed to the
commoner feelings; it served for dinners and dances, as in the banquets
depicted by Veronese. It represented the voices of nature. It was best
understood on the water, and then the most staid and stolid of people
found it one of the joys of life. It was the delight of pleasure-loving
nations: “Abolish music, and we must e’en fall to prayers.”[243] At
Venice, as soon as the old cupolas, the tall statues and the long
façades—decorations for a dance in motley—became blurred in the evening
haze, the city seemed to swim in music: a thousand bells chimed out
the _Ave Maria_; jangled sounds of serenades and concerts rose from
the palaces, the alleys, every nook and cranny; the sea sent back its
response; noisy parties lightly skimmed the glistening surface of the
Grand Canal; illuminated barges splashed their oars under a window,
with an orchestra or band of singers. Strange intoxication! Many pious
Italians, like Alberto Pio, thought it so delightful that they loved to
transfer it into the churches. Why not? These thrilling symphonies did
not follow the sacred texts very closely, it was said; they were not
always of the highest class. “You hear the boys whinnying, the tenors
bellowing, the counters braying, the altos bawling, the basses scraping
the bottom of a well,” and in all this the Puritans could see no trace
of deep religious feeling, “no well-modulated pronunciation, the perfect
enunciation which brings the words home to the soul.”[244] It was a
deafening, stupefying music. But if it is necessary for our happiness
that senses and emotions should be appealed to simultaneously, why say no?
Even dance music may ennoble the dance and become an element of
enthusiasm, peace, and joy. This was admirably expressed by one Madame
de Sillé. A canon sitting beside her was laughing at the sight of men
leaping about, while another was bursting his lungs blowing into a hollow
stick. “What!” she said, “aren’t you aware then of the power of music?
The sound from this stick penetrates the mind, the mind directs the
body, and these buffooneries are the expression of the soul! Would you
prefer to play at tennis?” The canon held his tongue, more especially
as he caught oblique glances in his direction, and had premonitions of
being dragged into the dance by way of reprisal. Even from all this
racket of the dance—from the harps, lutes, organs, manichords, checkers,
psalteries, rebecks, guitars, tabors, bass viols, flageolets—a measure of
expression was demanded. The harpist whom Mantegna shows us setting the
Muses to dance is throwing his whole soul into his work; he is leading
the dance.[245]
Here we should properly say something about the drama, but we shall treat
it briefly, seeing that in those days it was very far from displaying
the same activity as at present. In particular, the women’s share in the
drama was only that of a section of the public. It was above all the
art of the prelates, who devoted as much care to altering its character
as the women did to preserving the old romances. Thus the two great
forces of platonism were pitted against each other—the prelates eager to
advance, the women anxious to hang back.
The drama with its modern tendencies took possession of Italy in the
15th century, and Rome was almost its birth-place. Pomponius Laetus,
officially licensed to produce the plays of Plautus and Terence, died a
few days after Savonarola. The ashes of the monk had been scattered to
the winds; but all Rome was eager to accompany the remains of Laetus to
Ara-Coeli, since it was a work of true piety to increase the joy of life.
The palm for dramatic art was, with one consent, awarded to Bernardo
Dovizio da Bibbiena, who had the happy notion to shake off the yoke
of translation and to write a new piece in imitation of Plautus—the
_Calandra_.
Bibbiena[246] is one of the best types of this prelatic world, which
after all cannot be dissociated from the world of women. He belonged to
the inner circle of Leo X.’s friends, having been brought up with him,
though the son of a peasant. He had a spirit and verve which, according
to Paul Jove, “carried the gravest of people off their feet.” He was
supremely in his element at the table. Moreover, he was one of those
astonishing men who live at the same time a life of toil and of pleasure.
On becoming a cardinal he displayed vast activity—acted as legate,
preached a crusade, and died at fifty. He has left a goodly number of
treatises, poems, and letters; but it was the drama that made him famous.
It is impossible to describe the stir the first representation of his
_Calandra_ made at Urbino, the home of platonism. Everything was planned
with the care and skill of perfect “amateurs.”
The stage represented stucco monuments and other scenic illusions
executed by such artists as that age afforded. The auditorium, which was
not marked off from the scenery, represented fortifications, and the
spectators lolled there at their ease on excellent carpets, amid lustres
and garlands of flowers. The orchestra, placed out of sight, was heard
now on one side, now on the other.
Nor had the organisers neglected any means of strengthening the play
itself by a great variety of spectacles—a prelude played by children; a
prologue; four pantomimes between the acts, representing the story of
Jason, with bulls made of stuffed hides, their nostrils flaming, Venus
surrounded by Cupids, Neptune drawn through the flames by fantastic
monsters, Juno encircled by a flight of birds so natural that even
Castiglione, who had had them made, for a moment believed them to be
real. These pantomimes were danced through in the cleverest fashion, with
wonderful mechanical effects. At the close a Cupid recited some verses,
concealed viols gave forth a ‘song without words,’ and a quartette of
voices concluded with a hymn to Cupid.
And after all, if the ladies had not actually the direction of this
platonic entertainment, they lost nothing thereby; it was dedicated to
them, and the whole performance had for its aim the glorification of
ideal love. Such a representation assumed an elevated and almost solemn
character, similar in kind to the performances at Bayreuth in these days.
Was the _Calandra_ a masterpiece? No. The plot turned upon the difficulty
of distinguishing between two twins, brother and sister, who changed
clothes as circumstances demanded; from this Bibbiena derived risky
situations, broad jokes, and a complicated dénoûment. But it achieved
an immense success. It was represented again at Urbino in 1513, and
afterwards at the Vatican on the occasion of a visit from Isabella
d’Este. On that supreme stage its licenses came under the fierce light
of criticism, and scandalised some of the cardinals; but on the other
hand it was so magnificently interpreted, it was so excellent “in
dramatic elegance, in wit, well-knit construction, and gaiety,” that the
enthusiasm was unbounded. The marchioness Isabella did not rest till she
had organised a similar performance, an event which took place in 1520.
From that time innumerable editions popularised the _Calandra_, which was
chosen many years afterwards by the town of Lyons for its festivities in
honour of Catherine de’ Medici.
The drama of the time attained its highest perfection at the Vatican
under Leo X. The skill of the actors, all men of fashion, their sober
Attic style, without a trace of the mere craftsman, made the drama an
artistic delight. As yet no women appeared on the stage. Their parts were
sustained by men, and in this connection we must present to our fair
readers a young prelate named Tommaso Inghirami, who was the coryphaeus
of female parts at the court of Leo X. A Florentine and an intimate
friend[247] of the pope, who, as everyone knows, had his own portrait
painted along with Inghirami by Raphael,—so perfect a writer that Erasmus
calls him “the Cicero of the age,”—Inghirami could have taken one of the
most notable positions in this illustrious generation if his amiable and
indolent dilettantism had not led him to believe that writing books was
carried to excess. He was satisfied with shining in conversation, and in
that he was inimitable: Bembo and Sadoleto constantly speak of him with
enthusiasm, and, moreover, in one of the most appreciative but critical
societies that ever existed, he won for himself as a conversationalist
a European renown. If he had not the extraordinary gaiety of Bibbiena,
he spoke with dazzling passion, wit, and fire; his large coal-black eyes
have an astonishing power: looking at them, one feels light flashing from
his soul.
He had an ardent love for the theatre. One day, when playing the part
of Phaedra in the _Hippolytus_ of Seneca before Cardinal St. George, he
so captivated the spectators by his distinction, and especially by his
passion, that the name of “Phaedra” became inseparably fastened to him.
He was a preacher, the learned librarian of the Vatican, the dignified
Bishop of Ragusa; but, for all that, from one end of Europe to the other
he was no longer known except as “Phaedra,” or at most “Thomas Phaedra.”
Only, the name was masculinised: thus Erasmus wrote: “I knew and loved
_Phaedrum_.”
Unhappily, about 1505, letters from Rome spread a deplorable piece of
news: Phaedra is putting on flesh, Phaedra is big. “So much the better,”
retorts Bembo in Greek, “we wish she may have twins!” The portrait in
the Pitti Palace shows him to us, indeed—this superb platonist type of
the pseudo-woman—as by no means a slender man. There is no doubt he had
been handsome! His eyes continue to flash and throw their unabated fire
towards the ceiling; he still has his fair, plump hand, his fine mouth;
and yet, seated at his table, he no longer looks anything but a handsome
prelate.
Radiating from Rome under the auspices of ladies like Isabella d’Este
or connoisseurs like Ludovico Gonzaga, bishop of Mantua, the dramatic
art reigned nobly in the courts and castles of Italy, without losing
anything of its elegant and artistic cachet. It adapted itself to all
circumstances with marvellous flexibility, ranging from the opera-ballet
played in the open air[248] to genuine comedy and tragedy. But, like the
Novels and Romances, it assumed a licentious and even cynical character,
which everybody regarded as natural. Thus at Turin, in the early days of
Lent in the year 1537, a comedy of the most daring kind was performed:
“How warmly the ladies here received it!” exclaims an eye-witness. At
Foligno, the pontifical prefect, a certain Orfino, superintended in
person the staging of _Marescalco_, an extremely light production of
Aretino; and soon after the performance this worthy pillar of pontifical
“tyranny” wrote to the author, begging another piece of the same stamp.
The _Ruffiana_ of Salviano and many other pieces of a salacious turn won
tempestuous applause. Some people took alarm and declared the theatre to
be a hotbed of immorality. The Senate of Venice, by decree of December
29, 1509, forbade any performance, even the recitation of an eclogue in a
private drawing-room, under penalty of a year’s imprisonment and exile,
“irremissible,” in the wording of the decree. (However, in a secret
addendum, the Senate reserved the right of pronouncing the penalty, and
by a large majority.) In spite of this, the _Calandra_ was performed at
Venice in 1524 without any difficulty arising.
The Italian drama, lacking the support of the ladies, had little success
in France.[249]
They lived there on the old Mysteries. The performance of these was
usually got up in a convent, or by a city; and, unlike the Italian drama,
it retained a character of patriotic and moral instruction rather than
of a work of art.[250] Thus we find Louis XII. bestowing a pardon on
an _impresario_ guilty of some criminal peccadillo, on account of his
excellence in his profession.
Italianists and French platonists respected this tradition. In 1506
the town of Amboise got up a performance before Louise of Savoy of the
Mystery of the Passion, “the most beautiful that could be discovered.”
A priest played the part of Christ; the performance lasted a week, and
was so successful that two years afterwards M. de Longueville wished
to repeat it at Châteaudun, and engaged in a somewhat acrimonious
correspondence on the subject with the functionaries of Amboise, whom
he accused of purloining the copy. This performance was very costly;
the town took five years (which seemed an enormous period in those
days) to liquidate a debt of four thousand livres contracted on the
occasion. It does not appear that Louise of Savoy, who was then residing
at the château, contributed in any way towards the expenses, as M. de
Longueville did at Châteaudun; but she certainly did not disapprove of
it; and towards the middle of the century it was again in the presence
of a thoroughly platonist woman, the second Margaret of France, that the
last known representations of the art of the Mysteries are said to have
taken place.
With all her daring on other points, the first Margaret maintained a
remarkable attitude of reserve in regard to the theatre. She contented
herself with experiments in an intermediate style of drama,—religious
comedies, a sort of Italianised ‘morality,’ easier to produce and not so
long-drawn-out as the ancient Mysteries, yet neither very pious, nor very
amusing, nor much calculated to take the public by storm. The result was
that the drama long retained traces of its original character. So late
as the 18th century Voltaire dedicated a tragedy to the pope, and fumed
at not being able to get it performed at Geneva. The only cosmopolitan
kind of piece was that of the farces, knockabouts,[251] harlequinades,
carnival drolleries, to which the most illustrious platonists of Florence
attached their names.[252] Harlequin and Punch were always a success
in France: “They have something that sets you laughing without being
amused”; but they introduced nothing new. The French farce had long been
flourishing on the boards; the Italian was only a competitor.
To sum up, the women of the Renaissance, as we see, did not try to be
savants or blue-stockings. They skimmed the cream off books and works of
art so as to get what suited their mission, that is, something to talk
about and to go into raptures over. They did not rise to what was called
“humanism,” like the prelates; they stopped short at loving intellectual
beauty more than plastic beauty; they cultivated a literature of
sentiment and passion, and took a keen delight in beauty of form. They
behaved as instructed women, and above all as women of feeling, as women
who wished to please, nobly faithful to their single-eyed pursuit of
elevated love.
CHAPTER VI
CONVERSATION
We come at last to conversation.
This was the goal, the sanctuary of happiness, nay, bliss itself. All
that we have hitherto spoken of led up to this all-engrossing object, for
love was the supreme end, and speech is the vehicle of love. A circle
of men about a lady, and she talking or making them talk,—this was the
supreme and final formula of life.
Conversation, then, was the great art of the platonists, infinitely
greater than painting or sculpture, greater than music, poetry or
oratory, because it alone established real communication between soul
and soul, it alone was privileged to body forth a whole realm of
unexpressed emotions which would freeze at the end of a pen or pencil,
and which music itself would render but ill. Words that well up with the
eloquence of spontaneity possess an indescribable vital force impossible
to analyse; innumerable details contribute to it—the inflection of the
voice, the gesture, the expression of the eyes, the movement of the lips,
the play of all the features. A mineral water taken at its source has, as
every one knows, singular virtues which are impoverished if it is carried
to a distance, and which the most skilful chemist cannot restore. So also
the fount of human intelligence must be drunk at its source. If need be,
it is well worth a journey.
Without women there would be no conversation. For a man who thinks he
can converse without wearing the feminine yoke there is nothing but to
go off by himself like Cardan, that intolerable chatterbox, who, though
the author of two hundred and fifty-five volumes, had the audacity to
publish a book _In Praise of Silence_. “Never,” he exclaims, “am I more
truly with those I love than when I am alone.” Our opinion would rather
coincide with that of the amiable emigré whom his friends urged to marry
the object of his passion, and who answered, “But then, where should I
spend my evenings?” To draw a man out and show him what he is capable
of, it is necessary for a woman to throw out the bait; an ambition to
please, an instinct of sympathy, a thousand fleeting intangible nothings,
veritable microbes of sentiment, will do the rest. But we do not hesitate
to add that, without men, women would hardly know how to talk. Men have
often inveighed against the loquacity,[253] the backbiting,[254] the
imprudence, the frivolity, the paltry and scandalmongering spirit of
the rudimentary and inartistic conversations that women engage in when
left to themselves; this kind of conversation can no more be called
conversation than certain intrigues can be called love, or than daubing a
house front can be called painting a picture.
Certain of women’s little defects remain defects or become virtues
according as the women know or do not know how to make use of them.
Gossips, the women who can think and talk certainly are, and they plume
themselves on the fact. That can only be called a defect in those who
have nothing to say. Margaret of France confesses that when she opened
her mouth, it was long before she shut it again.[255] Sometimes, however,
women are troubled with a certain intellectual timidity arising either
from their education, as their friends say, or from their temperament, as
their enemies maintain. They easily make up their minds, but can seldom
give you their reasons; their intellect clings like ivy to some principle
reputed substantial, in other words, one that is affirmed by their
neighbours, or is traditional, or is ingrained from childhood; and the
slightest breath of raillery only attaches them to it the more closely.
This disposition would be fatal to a writer. To write one needs the
power to think for oneself and to give virile expression to one’s
thoughts, at the risk of getting a name for paradox or eccentricity;
but for conversation nothing is less necessary; on the contrary, the
trite is eminently serviceable. Conversation serves to test current
ideas; it gives them so to speak a stamp, a hall-mark, a label, and
women understand its utility all the better because they largely avail
themselves of it and acquire their convictions through it. On the other
hand they possess as the gift of Nature that which is the very life of
conversation,—facility of assimilation without the necessity of going
to the root of the matter; the ability to express quickly, clearly and
copiously the impression of the moment; a feeling for fine shades;
skill in fitly garbing their thoughts, and in maintaining them with the
necessary unction, grace, and warmth. No more is needed.
The age in which we live, priding itself on its practical spirit, has
neglected this art of conversation. We have almost entirely lost the
feeling for it because of its unpretentiousness, and we declare it
unimportant on the ground that we are no longer platonists and can no
longer find in mere phrases the supreme felicity of life. Yet it is an
art of eminent utility in regard to the charm of existence,—a genuine and
highly intellectual art, an art that in the 18th century was one of our
national glories. By their witty conversation the ladies of the house of
Mortemart did more to make their race illustrious than all the artists
and all the soldiers. Saint-Simon has given us an excellent description
of the talent of three of them, who boasted neither of mysticism nor
perhaps of philosophy—Mesdames de Montespan, de Fontevrault, and de
Thianges: “Their court was the centre of wit, and wit of so special and
fine a savour, yet withal so natural and pleasant, that it came to be
noted for its unique character.... All three possessed it in abundance,
and appeared to impart it to others. This charming sympathy of theirs
still delights us in the survivors of those whom they bred up and
attached to themselves; you could tell them among a thousand in the most
miscellaneous company.” That was the goal aimed at by the 16th-century
women, since it made men immortal, and gave them a full life on earth
meanwhile—since, in a word, it was happiness.
We could scarcely realise the empire certain women exercised if we
neglected to take into account their wonderful conversational powers,
and judged them merely by their writings, or by their letters even.
Justly or unjustly, the writings of Margaret of France met with no
success. Marot, in complimenting his dear princess on them, had recourse
to an evasion of no little ingenuity: “When I see your poems only, I
marvel that people do not admire them more; but when I hear you speak,
I veer completely round, amazed that anyone is so foolish as to marvel
thereat.” Like many others, Margaret held sway through conversation.
Some cross-grained people imagine that to women talking is the easiest
thing in the world, that friends spring up around them spontaneously,
that the art reduces itself to finishing their toilette by lunch time
and then letting their tongues wag till evening. It is extremely simple,
they say. Simple! They think it sufficient then to fling their doors open
on certain days, and to deal out here and there among their guests a few
formal and chilling inanities! “Men are so scarce that when you have
them you should rate them very high,” said Anne of France, very justly.
Simple, not to rest satisfied with the mere glitter of small talk, but to
take full possession of one’s visitors, to form a warm nest of friends!
It is a heavy task. If in these days women no longer exercise any serious
influence, is it not to some extent their own fault? A superficial and
cramped education has often rendered them incapable of effort. They
are afraid of a conversation on broad, serious lines; they will not be
bothered with it. But to form a set, a woman must belong to herself no
longer, she must belong to her friends; conversation is her bread of
life, to adopt an expressive phrase, and she does in fact become so
habituated to her part that she cannot do without it; she _must_ talk, if
only with her husband. Mary of England used to talk to Louis XII.—
Soubz le drap couvert d’orfebvrerie,
Qui reluisoit en fine pierrerie,
Passions temps en dictz solatieux
Et en propos plaisans et gratieux.[256]
Bereavements and misfortunes only render conversation more necessary.
Emilia Pia,[257] proscribed, stripped of her all, and persecuted, could
not appear in the streets of Rome without an adoring throng of prelates
and admirers, just as there was never more laughter and gossip than in
the crowded cells of the Reign of Terror.
A well-bred man considered himself literally entitled to command the
conversational abilities of women. In this connection a very curious
misadventure befell some judges of the Parliament of Paris who in the
course of their duty went to hold assize at Poitiers. In the heart of the
16th century, when everybody went the pace, and the air was charged with
moral electricity, there was still found one town where the women would
have believed, as they did three hundred years earlier, that they were
lost if they opened their doors. Jean Bouchet,[258] loyal Poitevin as he
was, has described the boisterous amusement with which France heard that
some bashful ladies answered these poor judges through a peep-hole with a
_Non possumus_. The ladies of Paris themselves sent a petition to their
“colleagues” at Poitiers, begging them not to let their husbands die of
dulness. The ladies of Poitiers replied with blushing cheeks: “’Tis not
our way at Poitiers.” They hugged the tradition of dulness.
At Lyons, which on the contrary was a modern town, squire Sala,
chancing to be at his window one fine spring morning, perceived in the
street three ladies to whom he was related, going on pilgrimage to St.
Irenaeus. To dash after them and make them promise to call in on their
way back was the affair of a moment; and then he was a happy man, sure
of a pleasant day. We are no longer, you perceive, at Poitiers. The
ladies return; they dine gaily with their cousin, and pass into the
library; and then, during a desultory conversation, one of the fair
guests mechanically opens a Bible at the book of Kings. Nothing more
is needed. What a charming subject! The lady avows that she loves to
lie back in a cosy chair and read the history of the kings of France;
everyone joins in the conversation and cites some notable fact about
royalty; and thus the procession defiles past—Alexander, Agis, Brennus,
Caesar, the Merovingians, the classic heroes (Charlemagne, Godfrey of
Bouillon), divers kings of France, Louis surnamed the Fat, Philip the
August, the noble St. Louis, all the princes of the 15th century; finally
Sala promises to relate a story of Francis I. Unhappily it is long past
the hour for separating, for tearing themselves from this intoxicating
pastime; and, to tell the truth, when they got home these ladies found
that their husbands had put the lights out.
If this was bondage the ladies took it in very good part, and the men
left nothing undone to soften it for them. We have all known men expert
in the manipulation of feminine conversations, and deriving from them a
large measure of influence; for instance (to speak only of the dead),
Monsignor Dupanloup,[259] or in a different kind M. Mérimée, that waif
from the 16th century, who combined with extraordinary scepticism an
incurable impressibility, and, while free in mind and heart, was always
leaning on a woman! The men of the 16th century became charmers. A
political exile from Milan, fresh from a milieu of women—the physician
Marliano—acquired an unprecedented influence in the Low Countries by the
mere attractiveness of his conversation; people vied with each other
in praising its suavity, its “heavenly ambrosia,” its “honey,” its
“sweetness.”
Men moulded by the hands of Italian ladies could be distinguished among a
thousand; they could talk about anything and everything. Many writers of
eminent ability would have gained much by being less serious.
No one could help succumbing to this charm; and in truth it is easy to
believe that the platonists sought happiness from conversation, futile as
it was reputed to be, since they were constantly saying: “I was happy, we
are all happy.” Cardan himself recalls with enthusiasm the time when he
was supposed to be studying medicine at Venice: “I was happy.”[260] Ever
the same word! People cultivated their happiness.
“Ferrara,” says Lamartine, “resembled a colony from the court of
Augustus, Leo X., or the Medici; cultured princes—princesses who
were heroines of love, poetry, or romance,—cardinals aspiring to the
papacy—scholars—artists—poets half knights, half bards—met there every
evening, in the splendid halls of Ercole d’Este, in town or country.”
At Urbino, the conversations were broken by riding-parties, hawking
expeditions, balls, sports, music; life resembled a kaleidoscope, but
wit slipped into every pattern as the necessary element of beauty. The
duke was in bad health and used to retire early. After his departure the
evening flew by delightfully: the young duchess “seems a chain holding
us all pleasantly together,” said Castiglione. There was no standing on
ceremony; she was always the centre of a circle composed of men or women
alternately as chance directed. In addition to the regular group, the
company pretty often included some accomplished stranger, some scholar
or artist who happened to be passing through. They spoke freely to the
ladies on a footing of friendliness. As the evening drew on, some went
off for dancing or music, the others continued to start discussions
or tell stories enlivened with transparent allegories. In summer this
brilliant reunion was held in the garden.
Our pictures of society in olden times may often give the impression that
only wolves, lions, wild beasts, or else strutting cocks and clucking
hens served as models. But to paint this polished society of Urbino, so
enthusiastically bent on happiness, we should need colours no palette
contains,—transparencies of the Grecian sky, the indigo of certain seas,
the liquid azure of certain eyes. For more than a century the court of
Urbino was regarded as the supreme exemplar; in the 17th century the
Hôtel de Rambouillet was still striving to make itself a copy of it;
unluckily such things as these are not easily copied.
It would be difficult enough to deduce from the conversations at Urbino
a series of rules for the art. No programme was pasted on the walls.
But still we may note certain principles: a remarkable good-fellowship,
ranging from perfect courtesy to affectionate familiarity; a real
sentiment of equality, genuine equality, springing from an exact
appreciation of the various degrees of worth, and consequently in that
sense aristocratic; finally and especially, freedom, the most absolute
openness of mind, the absence of ambitions and pretensions, at any rate
so far as appeared; a joyous skilfulness in playing on the surface of
things, or in striking out into the vastest regions of thought without
effort or constraint.
Throughout Italy a somewhat Ciceronian and Attic beauty of form played
a highly important part in conversation. Men were distinguished by
their dignity of style and by a high-bred refinement free from the
slightest taint of the stable. We can only judge of their manner of
talk indirectly, through their letters; but an idea of it may be gained
from the letters of Bembo, Castiglione, and others, in which a lady
could see how to win men’s hearts while retaining all womanliness of
style, and how much affection—whether it be called love, friendship,
or simply a good understanding—gains by displaying itself delicately.
Women played the part of judges: they were permitted, if need were, to
stand on their dignity, to be silent or to speak freely at pleasure;
but no man could succeed without a highly suave manner; merit had to be
shown by some external mark: “Merit is not enough unless prolific in the
outward graces on which the praiseworthiness of actions depends.” But
appearances were sometimes sufficient. Even in their portraits, men like
Castiglione retain a something infinitely engaging and attractive—a bloom
on the lips, a softness in the eyes.[261] When at Venice we come upon
portraits of men all energy and self-assertion, the inference is that the
women must have lost their empire; and we do in fact see opposite them
portraits of passive women, all softness and sensuousness.
And these tender lips that opened only to speak to women, these caressing
eyes, do not deceive us. The prattle of these men was impregnated with
a dove-like gentleness, an adoration, in appearance wholly spiritual,
for the beautiful. Castiglione, an eminently graceful, caressing, and
persuasive talker, spoke with fluency, with something of flabbiness and
redundance, perhaps—a sort of perfumed talk, with nothing of “French
filthiness,” as he said. Vittoria Colonna wrote a charming letter to
Paul Jove, in which she spoke with great enthusiasm of “her” divine
Bembo. Paul Jove lost no time in passing this letter on to Bembo. “I send
you,” he writes, “a letter from your lady-love, the most illustrious
marchioness. It is very pretty, and speaks of you, and I send it you at
once without any of that resentment which rivals are so apt to feel, for
I am fully assured that Her Excellency’s love for your lordship is in all
points like to my own love for her, that is, celestial, holy, altogether
platonic. Her Excellency is come from Ischia to Naples with the other
noble dames; I mean the serene Amalfia and the superb Vasta, with the
Francavila, a mirror of virtue and verily a matchless beauty.”
Apart from the graces of manner, the charm of these relations between
the ladies and the prelates sprang from their perfect skill in effacing
their own personality, in suggesting that what they were giving was
pure soul—for suggestion was enough. A boor will strut about, listen
to his own voice, arrange his smile, select his words with a view to
effect—little absurdities, much less easy to endure than a really serious
fault. It was by their overweening though unconscious self-conceit that
the inferior clergy made themselves so odious in Renaissance society;
the monk would talk of nothing but his order, the parish parson fancied
that no service was so attractive as his, and that good music was not
to be heard except in his church.[262] They had better have been less
virtuous—and less fatiguing.
Conversation can glide along like a shallow stream. A pleasant talker
is not always capable of writing or painting profundities; there is
something more beautiful than a picture, and that is the face of
the woman watching him and enjoying his talk. In those days they
ridiculed—and not without cause—certain brilliant talkers clever
enough to win a wide-spread renown (without ruining their health by
profound study of Horace or Virgil) by nothing in the world but talking
on every subject in the same airy way—appearing to have forgotten half
they knew and to know half they had forgotten—able to bring in without
false modesty a stanza pat to the occasion. Such talkers are in reality
very second-rate, and it is not long before they get into difficulties.
Sometimes abstruse subjects crop up without warning in a drawing-room,
and then the conversation takes a course which gives opportunity for
judging men. At the instant when it appears to be merely disporting
itself on the surface, shining in full view, it takes a sudden plunge,
rises again, starts on another flight and again plunges; to follow it
demands an intellectual force and suppleness that cannot be improvised.
We can see this from the portrait Castiglione draws of the duke of
Urbino. The duke, notwithstanding his habit of keeping early hours, was
a good talker, like his guests; his speech was bland, polished, fluent,
and picturesque; he brought down his bird with one shot. But under
this appearance of ease and readiness he possessed an unequalled fund
of information. He could reel off long passages from all the classical
writers, particularly from Cicero. He spoke ancient Greek perfectly, and
lived by choice in intimate fellowship with the Greeks—with Lucian, and
more especially with Xenophon, whom he called “the Siren of antiquity.”
“We used to call the duke,” adds Castiglione, “a second Siren.”
Ancient and modern history, geography, the learning of the East, were
familiar to him. He died at thirty-six, after a long and very painful
illness; he had studied his complaint, and watched the slow-paced
approach of death, knowing perfectly that neither the pleasant climate
of Urbino nor the most assiduous attentions would retard it by an hour.
And yet, even under the burden of his last anguish, he retained full
possession of his intellect, with its charm and flame and serenity. His
friends pretended not to have given up hope: “Why envy me so desirable
a blessing?” he said to them gently. “To be freed from this load of
terrible suffering—tell me, is not that a blessing?” At the very last he
turned to Castiglione and recited to him one of the finest passages in
Virgil. He died talking. Thus, with noble colloquies like these, radiant
with natural kindliness, men lulled even pain asleep.
Philosophy and love were naturally frequent subjects of conversation.
People sought by their means to refine their sentiments, to analyse
themselves, to set themselves ingenious problems to be investigated at
leisure, to spiritualise love. For example:
“Is it easier to feign love than to dissemble it?—_Answer_: Yes, because
a voluntary act is always easier than an involuntary one.”
“Is it more meritorious for love to lead the wise to folly than fools to
wisdom?—No; it is better to build up than to destroy, and you can build
nothing on folly.”
“Is excess of love fatal?—Galen says yes; indirectly, through disease.”
“Who loves the more easily?—Woman, because of her fickle nature.”
“Who can best dispense with love?—Woman.”
“Which is easier, to win love or to keep it?—To keep it.”
“After perseverance, what is the best proof of love?—The sharing of joys
and sorrows.”
“Which is the stronger, hate or love?—Love.”
“Can a miser love?—Yes, love can destroy avarice.”
And so on.
Bembo, in a little book dedicated to Lucretia Borgia (for three years the
object of his passionate admiration), has left us an account of three
days of conversation which followed a wedding. After a charming fête, in
which young maidens furnished with tuneful viols had chanted hymns for
and against love in turn, three noble damsels remained in discourse with
three gentlemen on a flowery lawn, amid marble fountains and well-trimmed
groves.
One of their number, selected as the detractor of love, conscientiously
makes the most of its bitternesses, despairs, tears, revolts,
catastrophes. A discussion ensues, so searching, so touching, that at
times real tears are shed. The people who are perpetually at a white
heat and flaunt a salamander as their emblem come in for some ridicule.
But with what warmth the friends of love take up the defence of this
divinity, who is represented as nude because he is devoid of reason; as
a child, because like Medea he inspires eternal youthfulness; and torch
in hand, because in his school there is much burning of fingers! It is
towards this little torch that the whole world flits and gravitates like
a swarm of moths, while the divine archer speeds his shaft at the heart
of his victim.
Love, they add, is strength and life. When a man loves, he has no fear
of death. One of the company even declares in his excitement that he
invites death, and when the rest twit him with being beside himself, he
persists, and explains his subtle languor; he invites death, but does not
desire that most miserable condition! In spite of the extreme gravity and
conviction with which these questions of the heart were always handled
in Italy, the company cannot here repress a smile. But the speaker sees
nothing and waxes warm; his martyrdom is only too serious; the flame of
love can only be extinguished in a “lake of tears.” And another makes
answer: “When you see in famous sanctuaries a heap of votive offerings
bearing witness to the innumerable perils of the sea, do you go and deny
that these perils exist, or resign yourself never to set foot on a boat?
You do not, I trow. Well, we must likewise accept love’s crosses with
resignation.” And thereupon he glowingly describes its advantages.
At the end of three days, a hermit closes the discussion with a short and
sedative discourse on the vanity of the world!
Naturally conversation, even in Italy, did not always soar to such
altitudes. It passed easily from a vast subject to a pin’s point; to
make bricks without straw was a mark of talent! It was not everyone who
had the wit to frame an original remark about the weather, and follow
it up with a brilliant firework display of paradox! What did the idea
matter, so long as the shaft flew home? They would just as soon concern
themselves about the canvas a picture was painted on! They expatiated at
leisure on a large subject; but no one dwelt on trifles; they laughed,
wept, sparkled, they were pleasant and gay, elegant, coquettish,
artistic;[263] and all that they said was excellently expressed, with a
sure, keen, delicate touch. Conversation took a feminine stamp which it
had never had in olden times; it was the art of paying honourable court
to a lady.
The French did not approve of conversation taking this sentimental and
emotional turn. They talked to amuse themselves, for laughter’s sake. To
laugh was their chief concern; it was a mark of taste to take everything
with a laugh, even affairs of the heart; and any genuineness of sentiment
was sure to appear ridiculous, whereas in Italy a false sentiment strove
to appear genuine. Moreover, to speak of serious things, to appear in
any other character than that of an absolutely useless and incapable
man, far above (or below) everything literary, was unfashionable. On the
other hand the French appreciated the unexpected, a crispness of phrase,
the sword-play of wit, smart retorts.[264] Conversation was a duel. The
Frenchmen of that time were inimitable in verve and wit; they had a
really unrivalled ease and sprightliness of manner. When the Italians
tried to imitate them, they only succeeded in losing their suavity and
making themselves look foolish.
At the court of Francis I. talking and flirting were subdued to no
platonic considerations. If a man was inspired with a good thing, he said
it frankly and bluntly and with much gesturing. As La Bruyère observes:
“It costs women little to tell what they do not feel; it costs men still
less to tell what they do feel”;[265] and the more crudely the latter
expressed themselves, the more they were looked upon as right good
fellows. A woman of the world would listen to anything, and reply with
her “yes” or “no,” without ever taking offence.
The more the domination of man asserted itself, the more pronounced this
liberty in word and action became, and women came to think that they
could employ no better means of getting even with men than to adopt the
language of the barrack-room, and make frequent quotations from the
grossest books. They made men a present of their garters. Naturally the
men were very well pleased, by no means detesting women of so facile a
disposition. A German would entertain the young lady next him at table
with tomfoolery of the coarsest description, prating, for instance, about
heavy drinking, or low-necked dresses, or a woman showing her leg or
hunting for fleas: or perhaps, to appear intellectual, he would maintain
that evil has no real existence, but is only a human invention. Another
would allow fun to be poked at his wife or fiancée. Rabelais and Hütten
were the shining lights of this class of talkers. Even Savonarola, in his
character of a monk of the people, sometimes went very near the border
line; here and there in his sermons there are phrases at which a salted
skipper would blush.
Italian platonism was no enemy to laughter; it was quite the other way.
In the evening after dinner (the time when in these days men are lighting
their cigars), men who had wit and gaiety and no cares (three conditions
for which the cigar alone would hardly be a sufficient substitute),
laughed without stint and told pretty warm stories as a relaxation from
the ideal; but as the ladies were present and no one would have dreamt
of doing without them, form was always more carefully studied. Platonism
was nothing if not fastidious, correct, and ceremonious; and a platonist,
even when retailing a broad joke or when there was no occasion to put
himself about, did not cease to employ exquisite phraseology.
The French, on the contrary, laughed somewhat boisterously after dinner,
or on one of those oppressive afternoons when the dull sky seems to seize
us like mice in a trap. Our passion for broad wit has never allowed
itself to be cooled by the exhortations of moralists[266] or preachers.
Nor were ladies more successful in selecting subjects for conversation;
they had either to leave us to our own devices and be regarded as
nuisances, or to pitch their tune to the same key. An awkward dilemma
for them! They faced the music, and contented themselves with declining
to laugh when the jest displeased them; but in their hearts they
preferred a lady’s man who knew how to show them tenderness and respect.
Conversation is naturally composed of dialogues. Whenever it attains a
certain height, contradiction is necessary to keep the ball rolling. Some
one has said that contradiction is woman’s forte, and in this connection
La Fontaine retold the old fable about the drowned woman whose corpse,
from sheer perversity, insisted on floating up stream.
That may be true of worn, untutored women, good housewives to whom the
artifices of taste are a sealed book. The woman of fashion, preferring
to profit by all her privileges, hovers over a conversation, mingling
with it only to throw out a suggestion, a criticism, a reflection, an
argument, or to give a finishing touch. Margaret, for instance, launched
this aphorism in the midst of a discussion on love: “Women of large
heart yield rather to the spirit of vengeance than to the tenderness of
love.”[267]
It was often a man who had to devote himself to this duty of
contradiction; intellectual epicures took rather kindly to the little
amusement, and acquitted themselves with at least every appearance of
conviction. It was even a mark of genuine dilettantism to maintain
now one idea, now the contrary, like Filippo Beroaldo,[268] who has
recorded two of his declarations, one in favour of drunkenness, the other
against it. The question of the merits and defects of women furnished in
France an inexhaustible theme for social debate, and there was no lack
of disputants on either side. In Italy this subject was less popular,
because the ranks of the anti-feminists were thinner. At Urbino, however,
Fregoso[269] threw himself into the ungrateful task of attacking women,
and valiantly depicted them as imperfect animals of no intrinsic value,
whom it was impossible to compare with men, upon whom only modesty and
self-respect had any restraining power, and whose few merits were a
purely artificial endowment.
Yet, as it was impossible to be always engaged in dialogues or debates,
there was a large field for clever retailers of anecdotes and stories
grave and gay, and the talent was cultivated to perfection by certain
men of the world. Among these witty story-tellers we find another member
of the Mortemart family, Aimery de Mortemart, and the name of Germain de
Bonneval used also to be cited.
Story-telling in Italy was conducted with the same gravity and method
that were carried into everything. A “queen” was first elected,[270]
and she called upon each member of the company in turn. The stories
very easily verged towards salaciousness, but art ennobles everything!
Firenzuola dedicated a collection of such stories to the memory of an
idolised lady whom he calls his Diotima, his Monica, his Vittoria Colonna.
In France, story-telling ranked high among social amusements, filling up
the interval between mass and vespers. Everyone had fair notice of his
turn to speak, and made provision accordingly, whetting his own invention
on what fell from the lips of others. The _Heptameron_ is, so to speak,
nothing but a succession of conferences (without the platform and the
glass of water), at which each person present contributes his mite to the
discussion. Sometimes the remarks are rather free; when the anecdote is
likely to overstep the recognised limits, the speaker saves himself by a
gentle preliminary precaution:
Si ce n’estoit que j’ay peur d’offenser
La netteté de vos chastes oreilles.
_Des Périers._[271]
Margaret of France, who was not specially bashful, “could tell a capital
story, and could laugh, too, when she heard one.”
Another art which was still highly appreciated—a very elegant, charming,
and widely cultivated art—was that of impromptu verse-making—a pastime
for prelates and men of keen literary tastes. Leo X.[272] and Octavien de
Saint-Gelais[273] practised it with eminent success.
Boutrimés, or “_ventes d’amour_,” though somewhat antiquated, contributed
a share to the entertainment. A man gave a lady, or vice versa, the name
of some flower, and a response had to be made in verse of as epigrammatic
or complimentary a turn as possible. As aids to improvisation, manuals of
polite rhymes were published.
Such was happiness! Conversation in its various forms was the port to
which the barque of life made under full sail, trimmed with all the
safeguards, manœuvred with all the dexterities which we have described!
And the difficulties were compensated by the satisfaction derived from
bringing souls into communion one with another, from closely uniting
them, welding them in one enthusiasm of affection. Such a result is
beyond the attainment of writing. Genuine exquisites like Inghirami
thought writing was overdone, and if they employed the pen it was from
necessity, or at most to preserve for posterity the conversations,
the tales, the sonnets that pleased them; when a work involving time
and labour was asked of them, they wrapped themselves in an air of
austere solemnity, like people going to a funeral. All these brilliant
talkers lived quiet lives out of the public eye, seldom shifting their
quarters, with none of that moral trepidation in which the railway and
the telegraph keep us: they were light-hearted but not shallow, with
something of oriental insouciance, never forgetting that man has but
one life on this nether world, squandering their wealth of wit in lavish
profusion, with no attempt to economise it in order to sell specimens to
an innominate mob. They enjoyed to the full the exquisite pleasure of
letting their ideas float off at the mercy of chance; their thoughts took
flight and were seen no more, it is true; they burst like bubbles in the
air; but there remained the wherewithal to shape others like them.
And here was the great sphere of women. Their mission was to cause this
happiness to blossom, to tend it, nurture it, turn it to fitting use—to
make these bubbles a source of good.
This duty like every other had stern laws. It was not enough to be a
“queen” by election, or even by birthright, to fancy that the goal was
attained.
Women’s sway only imposed itself by dint of patience, tact, and a nice
regard for detail, and above all at the cost of genuine self-denial.
How many little trials and crosses had to be endured! To make herself
agreeable to the starched Spaniard and the boastful Neapolitan; to listen
resignedly while a Frenchman discoursed about his hunting and his limited
income, or while a Milanese or Genoese prated about his business; and
then with all gentleness, with a woman’s instinctive subtlety, almost by
stealth, to select among these men—to hold by an unconstrained and loyal
welcome those in whom she perceived some merit, and to bind them to her
by speaking their own tongue—wisdom to the wise, piety to the pious,
practical interests to the practical, gaiety to the young—and thus to
set them all on the path towards the desired perfection—what a task for
a woman! However, all that she needed in the rudimentary stages of this
education was to plant herself securely on her own rudimentary gifts—in
other words, to avoid scandal and tittle-tattle. But how difficult her
task became when she had to deal with men of parts, of warm affections,
of ardent temperament! Then, no doubt, it became interesting, and the
woman herself was reaping a profit which amply repaid her trouble.
“Ladies,” cries Champier, “if you must take pleasure in hob-nobbing with
men, choose at least those who can improve you and guide you.” There was
no question now of retiring to the Aventine, and fancying themselves
constantly in mortal peril[274]; a lady had to hold herself erect and
tighten the rein on these unruly men—to know the power of a word, a
gesture, a flash of silence.[275]
To retire to the Aventine! That would be criminal! Speech is necessary to
one who would minister to a mind diseased.
Conversation was not merely a pleasure. If they strove earnestly after
the Beautiful, it was because the reign of beauty is the most effectual
assurance of the reign of truth and goodness. Does anyone imagine that
a woman can shut herself in her drawing-room, and that all she need do
is to show herself beautiful, amiable, sweet, intelligent, tender to the
men worthy of forming her circle? No one thinks so. Woman rules because
she redeems. To direct or actively to engage in works of charity, to
send money to the wretched, without looking out of doors to see what
men are actually suffering or dying—this would be the absolute negation
of the social aim of conversation. Through conversation a woman comes
into living touch with realities. She must show herself as real flesh
and blood to the wretched; she owes them her smile, her beauty and her
grace; aye, it is her bounden duty to be beautiful, amiable, gentle,
intelligent, tender for the sake of those whose lot is solaced by no ray
from heaven. She must welcome the poor and lowly, and though she may not
be able to speak to them in Plato’s language, she must none the less
tend them with the supreme medicine of the Beautiful, enter into their
interests and their troubles, talk with them, shower on them her manna of
hope and patience, and—if she have it—light.
Perhaps we shall now be asked how many women attained to these altitudes
in the apostleship of beauty, and if we can cite many who attempted
to put their ideas into practice. Assuredly, we can. In spite of the
somewhat too artistic cast into which social intercourse was thrown
by platonism, more than one woman found in her own heart a commentary
which neither Ficino nor Bembo ever knew. In France we may mention
Anne of France as one who was thoroughly convinced that conversation
was a duty to society at large. In Italy, ladies of the highest rank,
like Isabella d’Este and Vittoria Colonna, slightly intoxicated with
Beauty, consorted almost exclusively with princes and prelates and men of
culture, and in this regard the Renaissance is perhaps rightly accused
of over-refinement; yet they possessed in a rare degree the talent of
diffusing around them an atmosphere of sweetness. At Urbino, a provincial
court of no little exclusiveness, even the stalls of the handicraftsmen
were lapped in a delicious air; Raphael grew up like a natural plant; a
thousand trivial incidents in the life of the place give us glimpses of
grace and amiability. The influence was indirect, but very powerful.
CORRESPONDENCE.
It would seem logical to consider correspondence as the complement of
conversation—as talk between persons at a distance. But it was not so;
talk it might be, but in writing, and consequently no one was very fond
of it; people distrusted it because of the risks involved. Yet certain
intellectual women of the 16th century displayed amazing activity as
letter-writers. While one might have supposed them to be wholly engrossed
with their rouge-pots or their friends, their intelligence and vivacity
actually carried them away; the pen appeared too lumbering a vehicle for
their impatient thought. In the letters of Julia Gonzaga, for instance,
it is often evident that the lady took the pen from her secretary at
the third or fourth line and finished the letter herself, rapidly, and
without troubling her head about grammar, handwriting, or decorum.[276]
To the student of handwriting, letters betray many little philosophic
secrets which are well worth attention. The handwritings of the 16th
century (for the most part illegible, particularly in France) are large
and free, highly nervous and characteristic of the writers, released from
the methodical and commonplace style of former days. The strokes are fine
and distinguished, sometimes a little angular, displaying all sorts of
vagaries, abbreviations and flourishes. What a “mirror of the soul” is
the close and tangled handwriting of Margaret of France, or the gaunt,
nervous, firm, aristocratic, jerky, disorderly style of the duchess of
Etampes![277]
The style of Vittoria Colonna is clear and plain, somewhat masculine
in character, but equally nervous and irregular, with a multitude of
abbreviations and splotches. A mere glance at the letters of these
influential women fills one with pity. Poor souls! At what a cost
of secret torment, distress, and agitation did they mould happiness
and peace for men! Looking at these human documents, these nervous
handwritings, one asks oneself if those sages are right who assure us
that to bestow happiness on others one must needs possess it oneself.
Was it at the cost of His happiness, or at the cost of His blood, that
Christ redeemed us? I may be deceived, but I sometimes fancy that I see
in these handwritings as it were a drop of blood. It was otherwise with
the men: they were happy. Castiglione’s writing has a graceful, tranquil
movement; his pen ran lightly and cursively; and if sometimes the strokes
seem laboured, it is due to an affectation in his manner of joining
the letters. Bembo placidly retains the old style, stunted, heavy, and
sprawling.
The tone of the letters confirms the casual glimpses we have already
obtained into the social relations of the time. People troubled little
about family letters; these were simple and short, of the “dutifully
affectionate” order, and composed of almost stereotyped commonplaces.
Hardly anything is referred to in them except the material affairs of
life—business, medicine, health, domestic events;[278] the sentimental
part is dismissed very briefly—probably because family sentiments are
necessarily sincere.
On the other hand, letters written to friends, which were very numerous
in Italy, were charming, tender, and graceful, ending often most
prettily: “Your little sister ... who loves your lordship as her own
soul—Isabella, with her own hand.”
These last words, “with her own hand,” were not unnecessary, for a
fashionable lady, not pluming herself on a telegraphic style, was
obliged on principle and out of regard for her dignity to leave as much
as possible to the pen of her secretary. Unhappily the secretary, not
caring to serve as a mere scribe, pays attention to style, and touches
up his periods, so that, failing an actual autograph, it is impossible
to be sure what in a lady’s letter was really her own. Moreover, a lady
of any position knew that her letter would be shown about, perhaps even
transcribed or published. Bernardo Tasso, Aretino and many another were
not startled when they saw books made out of their letters or of letters
written to them; and the most interesting letters of Vittoria Colonna
appeared early in the 16th century. It may be said then that letters
came midway between conversation and books. In a lady’s letter there
was nothing directly from the writer but the signature and the one or
two autograph words preceding; in spite of which, the letters of the
marchioness of Pescara and of Isabella d’Este form very pleasing and
characteristic collections.
After a visit from Isabella, the duchess Elizabeth of Urbino addressed
this note to her: “I know not how to cure myself of the regret your
ladyship’s departure has left me in. Methinks I have not only seen a
dearly loved sister leave me, but that my very soul is gone. I must needs
write you ever and anon, and make shift to say on this paper what I would
fain say with my lips; if therein I could clearly express my sorrow,
I am very sure ’twould be so potent as to cause your highness out of
compassion to turn back. If I feared not to be a burden to you, methinks
I should not hesitate myself to follow you. Neither thing is possible; my
sole resource is to beg your highness to think of me as often as I bear
you in my heart.”
Many examples of this delicate and sweet—almost too sweet—graciousness
might be cited. Emilia Pia, for instance, one of the Urbino set, writes
almost as she speaks, with great liveliness and humour, and always with
equal vivacity whether the subject be toilet specifics or philosophy.
The men have the same charm, and sometimes think themselves entitled
to employ the same exquisitely tender formulas. Brocardo calls Marietta
Myrtilla “my very sweet and dear little sister ... my sweet and matchless
little sister, loved as my own soul,” and signs himself: “Thy sweetest,
sweetest Brocardo.”
The terms in which a well-bred man could, indeed was expected to, address
a fashionable lady, may be seen from a letter from Castiglione, then
ambassador in Spain, to Vittoria Colonna.
“I have felt,” he says, “so much joy in the victories of the marquis
that at first I would not write a letter—a letter is so vulgar a thing!
One writes letters about events of no importance. I had thought of
fireworks, fêtes, concerts, songs, and other vigorous demonstrations, but
reflection has shown me that these are inferior to the concert of my own
affections; and so I am come back to the idea of a letter, convinced that
my marchioness will be able to see what I have in my soul, even though my
words fail to express it.” And he dilates on this talent of the divine
marchioness for penetrating hearts, and for reading there what the lips
fail to utter, and then congratulates her on the delight which she cannot
but feel. “And as to my duty towards your highness, seek, I beseech you,
the testimony of your own heart, and give it credence, for I am sure your
heart will not lie to you on what not only yourself, but the whole world,
sees shining through my soul, as through the purest crystal. And thus
I remain, kissing your hands and humbly commending myself to your good
favour. Madrid, March 21.”
Two years afterward he wrote in regard to the death of her husband:
“Calamity has fallen upon you like a deluge. I durst not write to your
highness at first, for I deemed you had died with the marquis; to-day in
all verity and admiration I hold that the marquis still liveth in you.”
Do we need other specimens of these gracious and somewhat ultra-refined
letters? Here is a letter from Castiglione to the famous Marchesa
Hippolyta Florimonda Scaldasole: “Most excellent lady, if your ladyship
were as pleased to know you dwell eternally in my memory, as ’twould
be infinitely delightful for me to dwell in yours, I should be keenly
desirous of giving you proof of it in this letter, since for the moment
I can do it in no other way. But as your ladyship has shown the world,
along with your many other wondrous gifts, that you are a woman valiant
in fight, and not only beautiful, but warlike also like Hippolyta of
old, I fear me lest you be somewhat puffed up with pride, and somewhat
forgetful of your servitors—and I would not have it so. Therefore have I
made bold to write to you, and to pray Messer Camillo Ghilino, my very
dear friend, to speak on my behoof, and to tell you that in Spain, as at
Milan and at Pavia, I am your man; and that, when I had come to Pavia,
whither the army led me, those walls, those ramparts, those towers, that
artillery, all those things spoke to me of your highness, knowing that
behind them you were all aglow with the thought of combatting so great
a prince as the King of France. You have gotten the victory, and now
and henceforth no one will be so daring-hardy, I trow, as to fight with
you. Deign to believe him, lady, as myself; and I beseech you, if you
be not of all ladies the least loving, bid me to be at Milan and where
you are. Messer Camillo will be able to tell how different it is to be
in such sweet company as your ladyship’s and to be in Spain. I kiss your
hands, and ever commend myself to you, deeply desiring to know that this
_benedictus fructus_ be reaped by a husbandman worthy of it. Toledo, June
21, 1525.”
After all, there was a necessary resemblance between a letter and a
conversation. In Italy, the note of tenderness is always dominant,
flattering and caressing even when gay. Some of Bibbiena’s letters are
full of deep feeling, and yet it is impossible to mention a more jovial
man: his fun bubbled over at the slightest provocation. Isabella d’Este
once scolded him for no longer visiting Mantua. “How,” retorts he with
affected indignation—“how have they managed to drop into those dainty
little ears so many gross accusations against me?... Here I see your
daughter, who appears to me the very image of that serene highness her
mother. Tell me again I am a lecher, and by God it shall be true as
Gospel! Would you have me swear otherwise?... Most devoutly do I kiss
your hands, and to my dear lady Alda I commend myself a thousand times.”
The amiable prelate was at that time assiduously courting Signorina Alda
Boiarda, maid of honour to the marchioness; and, as usual, the mistress
was not altogether pleased.
Another charming custom in Italy was for a lady to recall herself to
the recollection of her friends by means of a little present. Vittoria
Colonna sent her portrait to Bembo, accompanied by a few verses from her
own hand: “Verses pure and dainty!” cries Bembo, “that touch the heart
far more than a mere letter.” On another occasion she charged one of her
friends, who was going to Mantua, to convey to the marquis “a friendly
and sympathetic” greeting, with some small token of her regard. The
friend thought he was doing right in offering a basket of roses, and the
marquis lost no time in sending his respectful thanks direct to the fair
donor. And then Vittoria formally apologised in very affectionate terms
that her messenger had “honoured him so little” as to offer so modest a
souvenir.
Truth to tell, Frenchwomen showed much less feminine grace in this
matter, which explains our dwelling on the charm of their Italian
neighbours. The most Italianised of them could not attain this seductive
charm. In all the correspondence of Margaret of France you will not find
one letter recalling those we have just quoted almost haphazard. Margaret
did indeed sedulously strive to attain that charm, as we cannot but
perceive, but her languishings resulted in little else than prolixity. It
will not do to strain one’s talent.
Renée of France, though she became duchess of Ferrara, never acquired
the Italian trick; she continued to write with French brevity. Diana of
Poitiers and the duchess of Etampes amaze us by the almost arid precision
of their style; they might have given points to the most dry-as-dust
of attorneys; there is never a sign of a gust of passion or of love’s
finesse. The rising generation of Henri II.’s time came nearer the
attainment of a pleasant style. The king’s two daughters, Madeline and
Margaret, wrote excellent hands—easy, graceful, even, with a uniform
slope, the letters broad and clear, the whole style very distinguished;
and they employed pleasant and engaging forms, phrases of genuine
affection, especially in their family correspondence.[279] But they too
were at their best in short notes, and their most pleasing letters are
always very brief. The higher charm remained the secret of Italy.
BOOK III. THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN
CHAPTER I
POLITICAL INFLUENCE
The foregoing pages will have enabled the reader to see how little
the platonist women sought to exert a direct influence in affairs.
They aimed rather at moral and social influence. In no sense were they
women of action, believing likely enough that the course of events
would become modified naturally when men had changed. Conforming to the
aphorism, “Woman is supreme only as woman,” they devoted themselves to
the skilful development of the sources of their superiority, leaving
their inferiorities carefully in the shade. They avoided all masculine
modes—the rustic sort of sexless unattractive women, most at home in
the stables, strong-minded creatures who looked for a love they never
inspired; they studiously left to men the keen-edged activities of
life—law, politics, military service, all the needful barriers against
social inundation. Louise of Savoy was almost the only woman who so far
cherished the old ideas as to regret that she was a woman; who loved to
play a part in politics, and whose intelligence and energy won praise
in terms that recalled the great women of the past, notably Blanche of
Castile. She was a realist of the old type, who had lovers as a matter of
course, but gave scant thought to winning hearts: thus wholly differing
from the new order of women. And yet, by a singular chance in the working
of the old laws of monarchical succession, the world has perhaps never
seen more women called to till the places of men in the sphere of
statecraft. After all, monarchy is not a principle of pure reason: it
is incapable of mathematical demonstration: it is a principle springing
wholly from sentiment. Its advantage lies in this—that in a world of
tragic pettiness it gives a nation something to love.
Many women played important parts in these masculine struggles, among
which they were thrown in their own despite. The period was one of
constant turmoil, and they had no opportunity of enjoying a life of quiet
secluded happiness.
Among them was that unhappy mother, Isabella of Aragon, who was
persecuted by Ludovico il Moro, the uncle, and, as some said, the
assassin of her husband, and held captive in France by Louis XII.—a
luckless, warm-hearted, valiant figure who, in the effort to win Milan
back for her son, maintained a desperate struggle with the whole of
Europe.
Then too there was Jeanne of Aragon, that beautiful sunny-haired woman,
with features of rare distinction and sweetness, in her day the idol of
Nifo and the prototype of beauty. She had married Ascanio Colonna, a
soldier of fortune who had brought his affairs to a desperate pass. Poor
woman! On every side she saw blank desolation. She had just lost her
eldest son by a sudden death when creditors began to harass her and drive
her second son to ruin; and from the magnificent windows of the Colonna
palace, where she was imprisoned by order of Pope Paul IV., she saw the
pontifical troops marching by on the way to seize her castles. She could
endure it no longer. One morning she disappeared, no one knows how, but
probably in disguise: at one of the gates of Rome she found a horse ready
saddled, and she performed the astonishing feat of riding to Naples
without drawing rein. At Naples she became the centre of a cruel strife:
her husband had her son arrested, and the son denounced the father.
Ascanio fell, struck by an unknown dagger. And when his charming wife,
whose golden hair had never a fleck of grey, came in her turn to die,
they must bury her with her husband, and could find for the shuddering
tomb no inscription but the touching words: “A great-hearted woman, a
very loving wife.”
In a higher sphere even Margaret of Austria was but a genuine woman, an
admirable mother who never had any children. Compelled by family duty
to rule the Netherlands during the long minority of her nephew Charles
the Fifth, through all those years of toil and difficulty she set but
one aim before her, the preservation of peace. She was good, benevolent,
intelligent, but not happy: “Twice married and yet a maid,”[280] as she
said, then the widow of the handsome Philibert of Savoy, she would have
preferred the ‘tiniest grain’ that satisfied her heart’s craving to the
dignities that were poisoning her life; and she made no secret of it. On
her tomb she ordered to be set this striking emblem of disillusionment:
‘_Fortune, Infortune!_’[281]
And the great Anne of France, ‘the lady of Beaujeu,’ condemned to an
attitude of ‘knitted brows’ and drawn sword as a means of reassuring
her good subjects and keeping the bad in awe, that haughty, ambitious,
close-fisted, masculine woman, as she was called by those whom she had
reduced to a proper sense of the duty of prompt obedience—no one was
in reality less like the cold statue she appeared in official life. It
was enough to watch her features in the hour of strife, and of triumph
even; they twitched and quivered, and were only controlled by a visible
effort.[282] A modest, it might almost be said a humble woman, she
was constantly a prey to self-distrust, never acting without advice,
almost heart-broken at her victories, for her one dream was of quenching
animosities; caring for nothing but peace, justice, and a well-ordered
State, and carrying her loathing of extreme ideas to the point of
appearing obtuse.
When her brother was able to assume the government she disappeared from
the scene, quietly, with the least possible display, happy to seek
retirement at her splendid place at Moulins, amid all she held dear.
She had conceived so little taste for political life that she gave her
daughter a forcible recommendation to avoid its mazes: “Mind your own
business,” she said; in other words, keep strictly to your own part, and
if duty demands a temporary withdrawal, resume it as quickly as possible,
and be egoistic enough to make the winning of love your sole quest.
Such was the attitude towards civil emancipation and the careers proper
to men that was taken up by women of the highest distinction, whom glory
might well have led off in the wrong direction. La Rochefoucauld could
hardly have had them in mind when he enunciated the unsound maxim: “There
is no renouncing ambition for love.” To renounce ambition was all that
these women desired, or rather their ambition was love itself; when the
chances of life forced them upon the stage, their one desire was for a
man to lean upon. Diplomatists, of necessity psychological folk, were
under no delusion in the matter; when they had dealings with a princess,
forthwith we see them on the look-out for the man or men behind. “Giacomo
Feo appears to me the pivot of the State,” wrote Prudhomme, ambassador at
the court of Catherine Sforza; the poor man had just made the discovery
that Feo’s will was law. The great trouble of Anne of France was that she
could find no support in her husband, a man of complete integrity and
excellent disposition, but unstable as water.
On the other hand, among women of but average intelligence, there were
busy bodies with a lust for notoriety, parade, admiration, always ready
to interfere in anything and everything, to the utter despair of serious
workers. Of these Renée of France, duchess of Ferrara, may serve as an
example. Born a daughter of France, she considered that her insignificant
husband had been too highly honoured in wedding her, denied him her bed,
lived in her own circle, and entered into diplomatic relations on her own
account. Not that she had any definite political aims: her method was
the simple one of pulling in opposite directions to her husband, which
at a distance gives her conduct a look of inconsistency. Did she hold
with Rome, or Geneva? She would receive Ignatius Loyola in the morning,
Calvin in the afternoon, and anyone else when the fancy took her. To her
France was all in all; but the French government had only to request
someone to cross the frontier for her to receive the exile with open
arms. In somewhat limping verse Marot acknowledged her grant of a pension
(diminutive, it is true) which entailed upon him no duties but those of
a lover:
Mes amis, j’ai changé ma dame;
Une autre a dessus moi puissance,
Née deux fois, de nom et d’âme.[283]
Re-born indeed both were, and it may even be said that their life was
a constant succession of re-incarnations, in creeds and amours of hues
as shifting as the chameleon’s; for Marot notoriously proved faithful
to nothing but his pensions. Neither of them had any part or lot in
platonism. Marot chose to become its recognised flouter; Renée was merely
a woman of a restless spirit, without any solid abilities. In public
ceremonies she appeared at her husband’s side; within their own doors she
was perpetually at odds with him: an exasperating woman indeed, dead to
the finer feelings. The duke of Ferrara was not master in his own duchy.
One day he banished one of the most obnoxious of his wife’s ladies, a
Madame de Soubise: the lady instantly proceeded to arrange an interview
between the duchess and the King of France, and it was with the utmost
difficulty that this menacing combination was prevented from becoming an
accomplished fact.
The duchess had a lover, by no means of the platonic order, in the
son-in-law of this Madame de Soubise. He was a M. de Pons, a scion of
a family which enjoyed the singular privilege of rendering services of
this nature to royal ladies. Again the duke of Ferrara had much ado to
stifle scandal in this direction. Having recourse to the time-honoured
method, he sent M. de Pons on a mission to France, with sufficiently
general instructions, which found a natural reflection in the vagueness
of the official despatches. But the private letters of the duchess to
the ambassador were explicit enough in all conscience. She tells him,
for instance, that she is giving the hospitality of her bed to the
little poodle he had left behind at Ferrara, fondling it and kissing
it, “since,” she adds, “I have no one else here now.” Now, mark the
complexity of this feminine diplomacy! Attached to the service of our gay
ambassador was a spy in the duchess’s pay. But this was matched by the
fact that her own letters were intercepted and read in the “dark closet”
of Ferrara, with the result that the duke lost whatever remnant of doubt
he may perchance have nourished, but had the charming consolation of
locking up in his archives the journal in which she set down her doings
and secret thoughts for the sole benefit, as she imagined, of her absent
lover. The inevitable outcome of this game of cross purposes was the
impossibility of foreseeing when the mission of M. de Pons would be
concluded. But it would argue great simplicity not to imagine that the
duchess also had her “dark closet”; and in fact, she had arranged for the
interception and perusal of letters addressed to the lucky Pons by one of
her own ladies of honour, letters which, like hers, embodied a private
diary, and were as ardent as her own. It remains only to add that Pons
had left at Ferrara a lawful wife (the inspiration of Giraldi’s muse)
who loved him with equal warmth and devotion, and bore him beautiful
children. But all things come to an end, even diplomacy when there are
more reasons for concluding negotiations than for commencing them. So it
came about that M. de Pons returned, and the duke philosophically shut
his eyes and stopped his ears until the day when he took the liberty
of turning the key on the daughter of France whom he had been so much
honoured in espousing.
The duchess of Ferrara belonged to a school which was unhappily of large
extent, and was in great measure the cause of the ruin of feminism: the
school namely of women who were somewhat intoxicated with their power,
and who forced their way by hook or crook into politics and life. In
France more than one woman of this sort might be cited from the reign of
Henri II.
Serious women, however, very clearly saw that if they were to avoid a
fall they must take only an indirect part in affairs. When the great
sculptor Sansovino appeared on the point of sinking under a moral crisis,
it seemed quite natural that Aretino should appeal to his young wife
to come to his aid! There you have the woman’s rôle! Vittoria Colonna,
likewise, restrained her husband in the flush of an intoxicating
and perhaps perilous triumph, by a letter which has justly remained
celebrated: “Not by the greatness of your domains or titles, but by your
virtue, will you win the honour which your descendants may make their
boast. For my part I have no desire to be the wife of a king; I am the
wife of the great captain who has vanquished all kings, not by his valour
merely, but by his magnanimity.”
Such was the language of a philosophical woman, accustomed to take
lofty views of things, and to live in the atmosphere of the Beautiful,
that is to say, a life of mingled serenity and strength. Her reserve of
energy, lying hid under a wealth of kindliness, could only show itself
in times of difficulty: “The tongue is feminine, the arm is masculine,”
said an old Italian proverb.[284] The tongue directs the arm; there are
circumstances in which the tongue may sustain the arm, but that is not
its chief duty.
Woman’s part, it is admitted, is to act as a moderating influence in
joy or grief. We shall therefore not dwell upon that point, but confine
ourselves to answering a question of some delicacy. Women have been
reproached with misusing their powers, and with holding men too much
under their thumb.
To loathe war, to advocate perpetual peace, conciliation, hatred of
everything resembling an appeal to force, is admirable enough; but this
advocacy itself has its limits. Is not war also a salutary thing? Does it
not brace up nations sunk in the torpor of bourgeois materialism? War has
a nobleness and beauty of its own. And indeed, are we to degrade men into
carpet knights, jousting in cap and feather before a court deliciously
feminine? Horses, standards, heraldic devices, the sheen of armour,
the clash of weapons, the din of clarions and trumpets, of flutes and
hunting-horns and all the instruments that stir the blood,—inspiriting
as all these are supposed to be, and well as they may symbolise courage,
are they sufficient to preserve the masculine virtues? Love is often
enervating. Where will the army be,[285] what will become of the country,
if women carry us up with them into the clouds? Mantegna replies by
showing us Samson and Delilah,[286] Botticelli with his picture of
the cupids stripping Mars of his armour as he lies sleeping by Venus’
side.[287]
But we have already given the true answer.
Certainly woman’s place is not in the camp. The virago has no vogue:
men do not fight women nor take them prisoners. Women do in truth
loathe war. But when the war is noble they become its advocates. War is
a noble thing when it is waged in self-defence, when honour and life
and liberty are at stake. Then, be sure, women are not lagging in the
rear. Beatrice d’Este with a stout heart dragged Ludovico il Moro to the
camp facing the French; and there, showing him an army quaking for all
its cheers at that solemn hour the eve of battle, she set the feeble
heart of her husband beating in time with her own. In November 1502 the
ladies of Urbino besieged the ducal palace with offers of their jewels
for the purpose of repelling Caesar Borgia. At Sienna, the women, led
by ladies of the highest rank, set to work to carry baskets of earth
upon their heads, and, what is still more extraordinary, they agreed
to perform this service systematically under the orders of three lady
captains recognisable by their satin petticoats. One young girl pushed
her enthusiasm to such a length as to disguise herself in a soldier’s
uniform in order to pass the night on the ramparts. Monluc[288] himself,
that hardened old warrior, waxed enthusiastic in praise of such notable
courage, and promised eternal glory to these fair ladies. And was not
Anne of France familiar with the camp? Have we not told the story of that
Françoise d’Amboise who raised a troop to repel a band of brigands!
But to fire a woman’s heart a just cause is needed, otherwise she
execrates war. Clever people may talk as they please,—praise the Amazons
of Georgia, the ancient Ligurian women who tilled their fields, or recall
the visions of Plato in the fifth book of the _Republic_ or the seventh
of the _Laws_ on the military and political aptitudes of women: these
are paradoxes which influence no one. Maria Puteolana, who attained the
rank of captain in the Italian army, was laughed at; and, to tell the
truth, the military inspiration of certain heroines at critical moments
was regarded as purely adventitious. It came to St. Catherine of Sienna
“by the riches of grace”; to Joan of Arc “by divine grace, by mystery
divine.” So strong was the belief in Joan’s saintship that it brought her
to the stake. She resembled Deborah and Judith; her story was repeated in
the most insignificant hamlets, and all France gave ceaseless thanks to
God for so clearly manifesting Himself through the feeble arm of a woman,
a shepherd-lass: “_sicut populum tuum per manum feminae liberasti_.”
But this was only an additional stanza in the love litany (long enough
already) lisped by poets and the faithful to the Virgin of Virgins: a
love-poem, but at the same time a malediction on war and the spirit of
conquest.
When men spoke, even in favourable terms, of the women who had been
thrown by the force of circumstances among tragic incidents like these,
it was as though they were celebrating a sort of suicide. Castiglione
has devoted verses charged with real emotion to the memory of a young
girl who was mortally wounded at the storming of Pisa in 1499, at the
moment when she was leading on the defenders. She was carried away dying,
he says, and as she lay upon her mother’s bosom, she exclaimed that her
country owed her no other bridal! “Virago,” he adds, wiping his eyes.
The last word on these military women was said by a woman, the charming
Isabella Villamarina, who was resolved to don man’s clothes and start for
the army like the wife of Mithridates, with no thought of fighting, but
to be with her husband, the prince of Salerno, whom she madly loved. But
the prince insisting on her staying at home, it occurred to her to pass
the whole of the day in bed, hoping to see her husband in her dreams!
It was not simply by dint of philosophical reasoning that women avoided
active and masculine occupations. They were well aware that they had
everything to lose if they lived the life of men. Men rode rough-shod
over them. Such women as an evil star did actually fling into the
vortex—and these were rare—were invariably women of a robust and sensuous
type.
Could a more striking example be cited than Catherine Sforza, a luckless
princess perpetually condemned to stand on the defensive, and on this
account fated to remain on the outskirts of the world in which she might
have played so lofty a part? A notable woman, endowed with nature’s most
prodigal and magnificent gifts; tall, strong, good-looking enough, with a
clear, superb complexion; in speech warm, forceful, impulsive, her voice
ringing out for the most part like a trumpet call, but capable also of
enchanting caresses. There was nothing theatrical in her wonderful force
of mind, which asserted itself in grand outbursts on all occasions, as
when, for instance, she wrote to her sons from the depth of her dungeon
in the castle of Sant’ Angelo, bidding them not to be concerned for her.
“I am habituated to grief,” she said; “I have no fear of it.” Or on that
other occasion, the day of the storming of her capital, when the boldest
of the French, forcing their way into the innermost entrenchments,
succeeded finally, after unheard-of exertions, in capturing her, like
a lioness caught in a snare. Here we have the reverse of the medal:
strip her of her armour and she is a woman, one of the feeblest of her
sex. Catherine exhausted all her vigour in politics: she was swayed by
her senses; almost unknown to herself she imparted to all about her
the unquenchable thirst for sensual pleasure by which she was herself
devoured. Her first three husbands died by the assassin’s knife. The
magnificent Ordelaffi, one of her foes, would never have wrested the
county of Imola from her by mere force of arms; but to vanquish the
woman herself by the magnetism of the senses was but the sport of an
afternoon. And when Catherine, hopelessly entangled in these toils, heard
the people discussing her, the lioness roared: sentences of imprisonment
and the strappado were the outward and visible signs of her love. The
scene changes; the amiable Ordelaffi gives place to a lover more worthy
of her. Before the virile force of this man, threatening constantly to
sell his soul to the devil, and (a more serious matter) the state to the
Turks, Catherine is subjugated: she marries him. Feo becomes an odious
tyrant: denunciations, persecutions, tortures are his wedding gifts. As
was to be expected, Feo fell stabbed to the heart under the very eyes of
his sovereign, and then Terror spread her vampire wings, and the silent
prisons swam with holocausts of blood.
Were we wrong in saying, at the outset, that under the exquisite charm
of life’s manifestations, the brute in man was struggling all the
time! Possibly it was imagined that in muzzling the brute, women were
obeying a natural instinct, and that there were certain sensualities and
bestial horrors little to be feared in regard to women brought up in an
atmosphere refined almost to rarefaction. According to Nifo and others,
all that was wanted was to encourage recourse to the platonist theories.
And yet here we see, in appalling contradiction, this great figure of
Catherine Sforza dominating her epoch, as though to show to what a pitch
the intoxication of masculine women could rise. For at bottom she was a
woman of an excellent heart—this Catherine who died under the name of
Medici; a genuine sister of mercy, thoughtful, generous, diligent in
feeding the poor in time of famine, and, when an epidemic was raging,
marvellous as a sovereign and a sick-nurse! And how lovely she was!
How well she knew, in the intervals of her frenzied existence, how to
enjoy life, when she gave herself up to the beauty of her flowers,
the charm of her gardens, the delight of seeing her splendid drove of
cattle peacefully grazing in her parks! Dogs never had a more tender
protectress. She evoked her people’s enthusiasm and applause when, riding
in a red skirt at the head of her huntsmen, like a legendary fairy, and
reining up her horse with her delicate scented hand, she smiled upon them
all, her beautiful white teeth flashing between her full ruby lips.
What did she lack, then, to make her in very truth a woman? Only
womanliness, and the exquisite power of using love as a quickening
instead of a destroying spirit. With her, it was quite useless to assume
airs of ethereality. The style she needed is that which we find in the
letters of one of the men she loved, Gabriele Piccoli. This Piccoli
served her as ambassador, and one day Catherine scolded him for making
too free a use of poetry in his despatches. Upon that, he lost his head;
he felt that his heart was all aflame, “boiling over” he says; he was
beside himself with exultation, speaking of his Divinity, his Hope,
anxious to take flight and abandon everything in order to live “under
the shadow and in the confidence of his princess”; then, with a sudden
transition, he reports in the most precise terms various diplomatic
schemes, not a little complicated. In reality, the letter is that of a
man speaking to a woman of forty, and seeing her as she was, good-hearted
and tender, yet vigorous and virile. Why did he love her? Because, all
said and done, she intoxicated men. In the evening she would dance like
a mad thing,[289] and next morning go on a pilgrimage: a strange wild
creature. She ended by marrying a Medici, a man of delicate, idealistic,
almost effeminate temperament. There is nothing so strange as the
colloquy which took place between her and Savonarola. She had written to
the monk to request his prayers, and he replied in a charming letter, of
mingled serenity and strength, in which he takes high ground in rebuking
her life. This letter is dated June 18, 1497, the very day on which all
the churches in Florence were thundering with the papal proscription
launched against him. Ah! how tragic, how impressive an encounter was
this, between two souls equally belated, though in a different sense: the
pure monk face to face with death: the woman, born too soon or too late,
the prey of destiny! The French formed an excellent judgment of this
woman of bronze and thunder, who had ceased to be a woman: they called
one of their most formidable pieces of artillery “Madame de Forli.”
There was one woman, perhaps, who diffused through the camps a real
chivalrous enthusiasm: but this was in Spain, and faith and fatherland
were concerned. Isabella the Catholic ordered that she should be buried
on the battlefield of Grenada, wrapped in the broad folds of her royal
mantle, as though to preach lessons of valour even after her death. To
this day her great soul appears to hold sway in Spain.
She was a wonderful mixture of different kinds of heroism. She was
brave and resolute without a touch of the virago. After a night spent
in dictating orders, she would tranquilly resume a piece of church
embroidery, or, like Anne of France, the practical education of her
daughters. In her own private affairs she was plain and simple, in
public she was all ostentation. She was a conversationalist of the first
order, and loved to attack high philosophical questions, here and there
dropping into a discussion some original phrase, some bold and clear-cut
thought, while her deep blue eyes lit up and darted upon her company a
certain glance of warmth and loyalty the renown of which still clings
to her name. A strange woman! ardent like Anne of France, guileless,
straightforward, somewhat starched perhaps, but all heart for her
friends, so fond a mother that she died of the loss of her children, so
thorough a woman that she declared she knew only four fine sights in the
world: “a soldier in the field, a priest at the altar, a beautiful woman
in bed, a thief on the gibbet.”
No king could ever have exercised the same ascendancy. Spain is too
proud a country! A Spaniard to whom you speak of an army will tell you
with perfect coolness that it consisted of 3000 Italians, 3000 Germans,
and 6000 soldiers, that is to say, 6000 Spaniards. Isabella and Anne
of France were of a style which could only succeed in Spain or France.
Castiglione himself shrinks in awe before such figures, declaring that he
knows nothing like them in Italy.
Michelangelo showed himself to be less pessimistic, and has constantly
endowed his women with ideal traits of greatness of soul. His _Virgin_ of
the Casa Buonarotti, with the profile of a Roman matron, holds herself
erect and looks straight before her with the forceful eye of a woman who
would dare anything in defence of her treasure, this feeble little man
to be, gathered so close to her breast that but little of his back is
visible: in very truth, _fructus ventris tui_.
Every lady must have seen the exquisite _Pietà_ in St. Peter’s at
Rome.[290] It is the finest monument ever erected to the honour of the
sex. Overwhelmed by the tragedy of Savonarola, Michelangelo has given
utterance in that picture to the cry of his soul: he makes his appeal to
women in the name of Christ.
On her knees, with simplicity, without sensible effort, the Mother bears
her dead Son—a cruel burden! Her wide-flowing drapery, her beautiful
form, the purity of the lines of her face, all reveal so great a force
of soul that the fact of her appearing as youthful as her son causes no
surprise. But the Christ is not, for His part, pressing heavily upon her.
Though He is dead, one feels that He still lives, from the love which
speaks forth from His wan, worn features: by the power of love He has
vanquished divine Death, a death He sought, and almost loved. And the
pure, grave mother, filled with a profound compassion, seems yearning to
bring Him forth a second time, into a complete imperishable life: hers
is an impersonal type, not representing this or that woman, this or that
mother:
Le corps, enfin vaincu, recule devant l’âme,
Et la terre, ayant vu cette Vierge et ce Dieu,
Va comprendre l’Amour et respecter la Femme.[291]
Michelangelo exalts the eternal woman, sustaining the Man of Sorrows by
the strength of love. He has left us as his final bequest, as it were,
the symbol of all the strenuous women of the fifteenth century, who had
just run so glorious a race in Italy, and who saw from serene heights
the suffering they themselves never felt—the ancestors of Vittoria
Colonna and Margaret of France. And yet he had no wish to exaggerate.
When he came to paint the _Last Judgment_, he no longer set woman in the
foreground, like the naïve old masters; he placed her respectfully in the
rear, giving her an attitude of humility, suppliance, and compassion,
because, even for him, woman was before all things the incarnation of
sweetness and kindliness, and because, in those dread hours when it is
for power and justice to pronounce the final doom, every woman must needs
stand in the shade.
CHAPTER II
MORAL INFLUENCE
The moral purification of society is assuredly one of the conditions of
happiness; hence it was one of the chief ends of platonism. The 16th
century, unfortunately, was one of the most corrupt periods known to our
history, an undisputed fact from which some people have concluded that
art was the cause of moral decadence, because art in itself is unmoral,
and never acts otherwise than as “a stimulus to debauchery.” These
good paradoxical souls had ancestors as long ago as the 15th and 16th
centuries—ancestors who held the same theory and saw in aestheticism a
fatal blight to humanity. They refused to acknowledge the idea of the
beautiful: and the belief that a careful observation discovers some
trace of beauty everywhere—that even in the mind of a criminal there
are sometimes uncommon, indeed splendid faculties, unhappily turned to
evil—seemed to them, as it seems to their successors to-day, a miserable
error calculated to lead mankind to perdition. Platonist women and the
Roman world saw in it, on the contrary, a pledge of regeneration and
civilisation.
We have already said that the world needed no further urging on the
downward path; love was only understood apart from marriage, and all that
remained to settle was whether this love should remain material or might
possibly become spiritual.
All the contemporaries of platonism who regretted the “good old times”
(and in France they were many)—Marot, Rabelais, Collérye nicknamed Roger
Bontemps, Coquillart the sworn foe of the fashionable world, “bucks” as
he called them—all these clearly explain their position; they lamented
the disappearance of love “_à la française_,” a whole-hearted love
without qualifications and periphrases; a love that was very pleasant if
not very moral. And as to the folk who believed that virtue was corrupted
by the salons, they had only to stroll through the fairs, look in at the
rustic festivities and balls, and chat with one or two tavern wenches
or a village “old wife,” or even to penetrate into some of the country
houses. In Germany, where morals retained their antique savour, it cannot
be pleaded that Dr. Faustus, with the little crippled love who waits
on him, or the coarse bourgeois Venuses of Wohlgemüth or Albert Dürer,
existed only in imagination!
The first contact with Italy, so far from purifying these manners, only
brought about the exaltation of sensualism; one of the most popular of
French writers, Octavien de Saint-Gelais, had no scruple in raising a
statue to “Sensuality.” The French saw in Italy only the pagan side
of the Renaissance, that of the Malatestas[292] and others, and, as
often enough happens when the field of contemplation is so narrow, they
perceived nothing but the more striking and startling phenomena—the flash
of daggers, the poison bowl; so much that an excellent young man, Louis
de Beauvau, who had wedded a young person of humble rank against the
wishes of his family, and repented of it, profited by the expedition of
Charles VIII. to get together a fine collection of poisons as he went
from town to town. Certain Italians who had come to France were regarded
as so many jinnish heralds of moral anarchy. “The only way to escape
women is not to see them at all,” exclaims one of them, Andrelini. In
truth, it was not long before Italian society presented a lamentable
spectacle of decomposition; observers felt painful heart-burnings and
overwhelming disgust. “This is too much,” cries Palingenius, dubbed the
Star of the Renaissance: “let me flee away to some peaceful, solitary
shore.”
From the year 1515 onwards the court of France advanced boldly along
the same path, dragging the country with it. “Paris is a fair city to
live in, but not to die in.” What a pass things had come to! When five
years had elapsed, Lemaire, who had been one of the prophets of the new
order, paints the situation in terrible colours, demanding as remedy
a convocation of the Courts of Love. Charming tribunals, indeed: but
what good would they serve? In the forefront of this corrupt and putrid
society the official poet shows us his young king, with his coarse
sensual lips wrinkled in a hideous smile, “consumed by women” body and
soul.
Free love flourished. The saying, “In case of love, one dame doth not
suffice,”[293] answered to the accepted axiom on the fickleness of women.
The noblest of ladies declared themselves “lieutenants of Venus.” It
was love in its basest form, a matter of trade and barter, cold as ice;
nothing was wanting to its degradation—diplomatic husbands, women who
were “merchandise for kings,” but a merchandise which proffered itself!
It is alleged that Louis XII. in his decrepitude knew not in Italy how to
defend the virtue of which he was so tenacious. The excellent Margaret
of France was amazed when a young girl of good family did not rush to
sacrifice herself to a caprice of her brother.[294] Young or old, it
made no difference. Women were known to get up bogus law-suits for the
pleasure of corrupting the judges. Others, with greater attractions,
flocked to the favourite or the minister of the day; others, more
numerous, threw themselves at the moneyed men, as rivers rush to the sea.
No one would guess what shameful shifts masked some lives that seemed
a brilliant round of music and receptions and play; or what a singular
population of waiting-maids, pimps, and procuresses of all ranks, forced
their unwelcome services upon a respectable man—
Piteulx comme ung beau crucifix![295]
Vice was everywhere the same, except for some trifling shades. If an
Italian and a Frenchman told the same story of an honest woman seduced
by means of gold, they practically differed in nothing but the tariff;
the Italian lady exacts a thousand crowns and disappoints the purchaser,
the Frenchwoman asks only a hundred and faithfully keeps her word. When
the matter comes to light, the Italian husband is very deferential to the
seducer, but poisons the lady; the French husband contents himself with
sending her home to her parents for a time.
We must not be understood to believe that honest women no longer existed:
on the contrary, there were still many. The only difficulty was to find
them, because they kept out of sight, or, at any rate, were too apt to
regard the exercising of an influence as beneath them.
Good women are often passive, incredulous, or at least resigned in regard
to evil. Many of them, brought up on the ancient principle of subjection
and abnegation, would ask nothing better than to shut eyes and ears
with the quasi-felicity of mummies petrified in an eternal sleep, and
to decline to believe in evil. There the evil is, under their own roof,
touching them closely, wounding them: yet still they smile and smile,
wishing to appear crowned with roses, and doing their best to fancy they
are happy.[296] What delightful reasoning, and how precious to feeble and
timid women who would fain eschew strife, and love always!
Vittoria Colonna, for instance, feigned sleep one night while her
husband, by her side, indulged in wild antics that pained her deeply.
Nifo relates, with the perfect serenity of an egoist, an incident that
happened to himself. He had shut himself up in his study to write a
_Thesserologia astronomica_. After some days his wife grew anxious, and
employed all kinds of stratagems to induce him to relax the rigour of
his seclusion. Not succeeding, poor woman! she went in search of a young
lady in the neighbourhood, of whom she knew her husband was enamoured,
and whom, after she had given her a piece of her mind, she brought back
with her. She shut the two up together, with the simple happiness of a
faithful dog, flattering herself on having discovered the solution of the
puzzle. But no, Nifo remained glued to his _Thesserologia_. Then the good
woman lost her head, vowed herself to saints innumerable, made pilgrimage
after pilgrimage, and gave many a votive offering. Three months
afterward, Nifo, when he had written his last line, issued tranquilly
from his tomb, and condescended (so he assures us) to raise his wife from
her depression.
Devotion of this kind was apparently not rare among the women of old.
There was indeed a classical little story which passed from hand to hand
about a Madame de Varambon. Monsieur de Varambon (so the story ran: we
must do him at least this justice) was a thrifty fellow, and his wife
was grieved to know that his mistress’s apartments were rather poorly
furnished. She ended by going herself to look after the furnishing, in
profound secrecy. This story excited the hilarity of men every time it
was told; some of them regarded Madame de Varambon as an old humbug;
others, as a poor godly old soul;[297] and that was the sole reward of
her virtue!
Apart from this bent of women themselves for submission and seclusion, we
must note also that Frenchmen formed themselves into a sort of league,
by no means chivalrous, against women who got “talked about.” If a
woman was talked about, it seemed a necessary deduction that there was
something bad to say about her, and the mere fact of a lady acquiring
any sort of public reputation, though entirely to her honour, apparently
gave everyone the right to fling mud at her. This was one of the most
formidable obstacles to the moral influence of women. It seemed to many
people, in short, that there was no choice between virtue starched,
prosaic and wearisome, or no virtue at all: that it consisted for women
in the simple devotion to an ideal of family duty—in which, however,
they did not always find happiness, and which religion did not always
succeed in beautifying, for the family affections are terrestrial, and
doubtless will not survive the earth. Husbands maintained this position,
finding it convenient. Vice and virtue in all their coarseness (there is
a coarseness of virtue) were each shut up, so to speak, in a water-tight
compartment: “to each his calling”; no compromise, no nuance, no degree
was acknowledged; virtue is always represented by Titian and others with
harsh malevolence as uncouth and ill to look upon, while opposite her
they represent the true woman as an embodied caress.
Untrue and untenable as this distinction was, no one cared to seek a
way out of the dilemma, not even the moralists. Lotto as well as Titian
represents the virtuous woman as a goose-girl, in conflict with Venus!
And indeed the singular comparison in course of time penetrated to the
core of platonist society, though it was softened down like a much
attenuated echo. Raphael, then a charming boy of twenty, fresh moulded by
the tender hands of two princesses, was conscious of the same thing in
his _Vision of a Knight_ in the National Gallery.
To him also the grave woman holding a sword and a book seems a timid
creature; he leaves her in the background as though unwilling to show
herself, and limns behind her only a rocky steep and a church spire
soaring into the sky. The other lady, on the contrary, graceful in form
and feature, stands out distinctly before lovely meadows sloping down
to a swift-flowing stream. What does she hold? A flower, no more. This
is love indeed, but eminently tender, eminently reasonable, almost
ineffectual. Raphael was so young!
Why then, even in the eyes of this delicate-minded stripling, does virtue
keep this character of ungainliness and frigidity? Were there in his day
none of those women of sound mind and steadfast soul who, while knowing
how to leave men undisturbed in their pride, how (so to speak) to respect
them, knew also how to stimulate them to set happiness above the woes of
life? It is not even the lash of passion we are speaking about; great
love has some trenchant quality that cleaves a way through materialities;
it is purification _par excellence_; it would remove mountains and still
the waves. Happy the woman who has once encountered it, thrice happy she
who has been able to recognise it and seize it ere it passed! For it has
but one defect, its exceeding rarity; and if the moral regeneration of
society were absolutely dependent on it, a woman would do better to fling
up the struggle, encase herself in triple brass, mystically shut her eyes
to evil, await a miracle, and hope for nothing on this earth but the
repentant tears of her husband!
We are speaking merely of women of vigour, made to support and guide
men—the women whom men style “dragons.” They are a species which
achieves little success in the world; men regard them as somewhat too
masculine, and are constantly making fun of them, especially when there
are good reasons for so doing. At Naples, for instance, one of these
dragons—Doña Maria d’Aragona, a respectable mother of seven—created no
little amusement because (so the story ran), in her desire for a large
experience, she had wished to live with her husband three years as a
wife, three as a sweetheart, and three as an enemy. Men do not understand
such women; it is a sense they are deficient in. These women were out
of date,—women of the 15th century, of the time before Savonarola. They
remind one of those old, high, rugged ramparts which perforce crumble
away, and to which we prefer a spick-and-span, vulgar boulevard, blocked
up with gingerbread stalls.
And yet the moral influence of women, from a social and general
standpoint, did make itself felt, especially in Italy. “You must not
judge men from the crust,” as Anne of France very well said. The opposing
parties were so little divided from each other that it is not easy to
distinguish them; there were materialists who did not scorn the ideal,
and idealists by no means unsympathetic to the material, and it was that
which gave an opening to the moral preacher.
For instance, Nifo, whom we have mentioned as a personal foe to Plato,
had begun by fighting against Thomas of Aquinas in the materialist camp;
but on being shown his folly by the Bishop of Padua, a prelate of parts,
he changed sides with a great flourish of trumpets, fell lustily upon his
master Pomponazzi, and became a Roman count with the name and the arms of
the Medici: to his own satisfaction and delight, for logical minds love
success. And by and by we discover him, folios in hand, falling at the
feet of female beauty with surprising agility,—quite eclipsing Victor
Cousin, whose passions were of the mere milk-and-water order and very
much behind the times. Renan, who has left us an excellent appreciation
of Nifo, reproaches him with the somewhat wobbly character of his
doctrine; but this is the very thing that interests us. If men were not
inconstant, platonism would have no further utility. Nifo, in short, was
a converted character. If men are bent on fighting, we must not complain
that a woman’s hand can sometimes draw them into the crack regiments.
This means, someone will say, that the conscience and the lofty
deductions of a serious or even a distinguished man depend on the rustle
of a petticoat or the colour of certain eyes? Even so; if the woman
stands for more than a petticoat and two bright eyes, if she really has
a heart, ardent and vigorous affections in which the man’s spirit finds
refreshment, what could be more natural or moral?
Look at Nifo again. Ugly, hideous, untractable as he was, he completely
changed his tune under the influence of a few artificial (perhaps too
artificial, indeed!) courtesies; if he retained some of the claws of the
primitive man, some thorns of the wild stock which it was so difficult to
graft, what does that prove but that under a woman’s fingers the roughest
bushes burst into brilliant flower? Nifo even came to wear almost the
same moral livery as Bembo. He speaks of Plato only with respect, and
of materialism only with disdain as a not very formidable doctrine from
which good taste and spiritual refinement cannot but preserve women;
he pretends to go as far as the “imaginatives” in the direction of
sociological love; he adopts in principle Plato’s theory of love as
an intermediary between the Creator and the creature; “beauty—aye, I
gladly confess it—is that which produces love.” His only weakness (a
very natural one) is that he cannot arrive at the Absolute, as Socrates
understood it, without traversing this earth; that he prefers to vague,
immaterial, supersensual dallying with love the personal encounter of two
living beings. On this head the meanest logicians do not allow themselves
to be silenced. They unreservedly, enthusiastically recognise the
religion of beauty and love, and its admirable effects on society and the
world; but at the same time they are not quite at one about definitions.
They pause in a sort of numb fascination before a pretty little piece
of piety who suddenly pretends she forgets her body and is only a soul;
they are like Dante in Purgatory, when he opened his arms and clasped
nothing but air. They do not prostrate soul and body in adoration before
a shadow, a reflection, a transient gleam of beauty; it seems good to
them to love a particular woman in virtue of a special affinity, or a
need of settling down; and in these circumstances they would in good
sooth think it great folly to torture themselves under the fallacious
plea that sweet love if gratified is slain. Love, they say, is one and
indivisible, not too base nor too divine: “You may cite me your heroes,
your saints, your angels: you may explore the whole realm of antiquity
to unearth types like Socrates and Anaxarchos (or, if you please,
Xenocrates, who spent a whole night in tranquil admiration of Phryne):
everything is possible. I myself furnish a magnificent example in loving
Fulvia without any base desire. But these are masterly achievements of
saints or philosophers, and St. Jerome shows a keen insight into humanity
when he ordains that men shall either regard all the Lord’s virgins with
a generic affection, or shall not love any of them. Horace maintained
that with greybeards the flesh is dead; St. Jerome replies: ‘You say that
the flesh is dead, and I tell you that the devil is eternal.’ Love must
be distinguished from friendship.”[298]
In France it was another story. Men were much more self-assertive. We do
not find them appealing to these circumlocutions or these tender ironies.
The annihilation of matter would have struck them as almost an outrage.
Among them things took an entirely different complexion from that which
we have indicated in the feminist society of Italy. Being the masters,
they regarded love as indispensable, and beauty as always good: “If we
thought ladies were without love, we should long for death”; only, adds
Erasmus, “they grant women nothing but from love of sensual pleasure”;
and the more highly placed they happened to be, the more natural it
seemed to them to degrade love. “To gratify a prince”—we know what that
means; there is no question here of an elevated love like the love which
fills princesses’ dreams.
The moral conflict on this point was in France acute. When Margaret
essayed to purify the society of her court by a leaven of beauty, her
entourage checked her, refusing to allow any effort towards embellishing
human life with the ideal. These men held too closely to the old logical
and realist spirit. They loved Plato, but truth still more. They did not
realise that their brutal realism had the effect of throwing women off
at a tangent, for a religion of some sort is always necessary; to save
themselves from men, women of high birth and noble bearing, carried away
by an enthusiasm in some sort heroic, attained to a mystic conception of
a life of pure sensibility.
But then what is the beginning and what the end of the dream? Without
touching on the cruel questionings of philosophy about the reality of
our physical perceptions, or on many of the ambiguous phenomena, where
does the vision begin in the moral life, if life involves so many
fancies, illusions, loves, gleams, which act upon us but have no real
existence?—so many vague aspirations, admirable but unsubstantial? To
fall headlong from a height into an abyss is a violent experience which
kills too quickly; the mystic vision is only possible on condition of
coddling the soul within the four walls of a convent; out in the world it
falls and is lost: that was the opinion of the logicians. When Margaret
relates with what energy of virtue she escaped the realistic assaults
of Bonnivet, and how, at the cost of a few scratches, she has reduced
him to the cold comfort of the Ideal, her husband is the first to laugh,
saying: “If I had got so far, I should think myself disgraced to fail of
attaining my goal.”[299]
It is a cynical saying, and raises a general protest; but Henri d’Albret
explains it very placidly, and we cannot give the gist of his retort
better than in the following sentence of M. Bourget: “You have the
morality of life, without having the morality of the heart.” Henri
rejoices to see his wife keep up appearances, but, from the moral
standpoint, he finds no great difference between her and himself, except
in practical conduct: “She and I are both children of Adam and Eve.”
He laughs and sneers at the nebulous philosophical aspirations of the
princess, and is not the only man who has got this strange impression
that the sins of the spirit and the sins of the flesh are equipollent. “A
fortress which parleys is half won,” says with feigned good-humour one of
the speakers in the _Heptameron_, appearing to forget that Margaret as an
inveterate gossip had readily accepted the sobriquet of Parlamente.[300]
Not merely did the adversaries of platonism accuse it of being only
moral in appearance, but this very semblance of morality, resting on a
misapprehension, seemed to them an hypocrisy that aggravated the fault.
They regarded platonism as evil and wanting in seriousness; Louise of
Savoy, an inveterate kill-joy, at once sour and sympathetic in regard
to pleasures she is past enjoying, inveighs bitterly against love that
is only skin-deep—the vanities and tricks, the husk and chaff of love
that is simply a comedy in which two actors show their skill; she prefers
a fault without scandal to a scandal without fault. However, the issue
seems to her perfectly clear: “Either you love, or you do not. If you
love, why impose on yourself the torment of Tantalus? If you do not, why
impose it on others?” She would rather succeed in a piece of folly than
fail in a virtuous action, however logical and practical.
She has a way all her own of squelching the fancies of her daughter;
she allows them to swell and swell, and then gives the merest little
pin-prick. Someone speaks, for instance, of a queen clever enough to
impose seven years’ preliminary probation on her lover: “Then she didn’t
wish to love or be loved!”[301] If someone feelingly exclaims: “When love
is strong, the lover knows no meat and drink but the look and voice of
the loved one,” she retorts that she would much like to see how he looked
on such fare![302] At the conclusion of a droll story, a maid of honour
who is a little over-excited declares that she would rather be flung into
the river than live in intimacy with a Franciscan; and Louise replies
with her placid smile: “Then you can swim well?” The other retorts in
great irritation: “I know some who have resisted more prepossessing men
than a Franciscan, without blowing their own trumpets about it.” Louise,
laughing more than ever, replies, “Still less do they beat the drums
about what they have done and granted.”[303] She is a sceptic and a
logician; with all her boldness of speech, she is never over-paradoxical.
Moreover, she applied her principles to herself, and had such a way of
encouraging her daughter’s lovers that they quite naturally paid their
addresses to her. At the opening of the _Heptameron_, for instance, one
of Margaret’s numerous admirers, furious to see his princess receive a
passionate declaration with laughter, hies him to the mother.
Almost everybody in France shared the views of Henri d’Albret and
Louise of Savoy. Platonism sprang up among thorns. And so far from
there being any bias in its favour, there awoke a reaction against the
finnikin absurdities of bygone days,—for instance, against the “bashful
knights” who sported furs in summer, and summer cloaks in winter, in
order to give ocular demonstration that “love was all-sufficient.”
That sort of mysticism struck men as sickly. They preferred frankness
and vivacity,—the frothy sparkle of champagne to the sugared liqueur,
golden, soft, limpid, heavy, old in bottle, which bore the Italian
label. Rabelais, who is our Michelangelo, takes great care not to dive
into the mysteries in Ficino’s way, or to pile up a heap of folios after
the example of Nifo. Look at him, with his learning and his consummate
intellect, sitting before a dish of peas fried in fat, seized with
inextinguishable laughter as he thinks of the “celestial and priceless
drug” of Plato’s _Symposium_, and deriding all the Picos della Mirandola
past and future in the person of Messire Pantagruel, who maintains
against all opponents 9764 conclusions, some of them highly platonic, on
“the philosophical cream of encyclopaedic questions,” on “the platonic
idea, hovering dexterously under the orifice of chaos.” Rabelais
dedicates his _Life of Gargantua_ to topers and the gouty.
And then you hear the loud chant, the babel noise, of gold, of Plutus,
rising above and drowning all other sounds. Artists no longer cling to
the old shabby studio in which they strove after the ideal: they have
now come to dwell in palaces, and some there are whose art consists in
coining false money or running after the philosopher’s stone—if not in
worse occupations. Even where men are wistful and dream, in the heart of
melancholy Brittany, the poor human soul, compared by a preacher to a
runner started upon the long race for eternal life, halts and stoops at
every moment like Atalanta, to pick up apples of gold.[304]
Thus the battle was joined on all sides at once, and the struggle was
fierce. Among so many ingratitudes, so many keen-pointed shafts, women
needed a proud courage to continue imperturbably spreading through the
world the spirit of love, the religion of beauty.
They did not succeed in subduing mankind at large, nor in directing
their moral energies. That dream had to be relinquished. They resigned
themselves to the thankless task of individually doing what little they
could do through their sympathy and tenderness. This was all they could
give, and it cost them dear, for it too often involved concessions, many
bitter and secret tears, a love mingled with disgust, an unavoidable
duplicity!
They had perforce to content themselves, then, with this measure of
success. To show clearly in what this success consisted, we shall divide
our brief account into two parts; for their sensibility was exerted in
two directions. Under their influence virtue and vice became each an
art: their defects and excesses were moderated. On the one hand the over
harsh virtues were softened, or, if we may coin a word, de-austerified,
and endowed with a cheerfulness of aspect they had formerly lacked; on
the other, vice was ennobled, and the gap between vice and virtue thereby
diminished. In brief, women tried to make life beautiful rather than
good, and piously to rehabilitate everything which had possibilities
of beauty, in virtue of the principle that the Beautiful _is_ good and
purifies all things.
1. THE SOFTENING OF VIRTUE.
The principles already established are, briefly, as follows: happiness
resides in love, love consists in self-surrender. Of this there are
several modes: one may surrender body and soul, or soul alone—or nothing
at all! To give the soul is the true platonism; to give nothing is the
false. The surrender of the body is the time-honoured sacrament of
marriage.
How did they set about reconciling these various elements? In a manner
that was simplicity itself.
We have said that marriage had become a human and reciprocal contract,
concluded with a definite object between two fellow-creatures; and
logically there was no reason why it should not have ended as it began,
by mutual consent, that is, in the community of women[305] according to
Plato’s idea.
But on the contrary the platonists, who looked for no poetry in the prose
of wedlock, regarded one marriage as quite sufficient, if not excessive.
Further, the institution was an ancient one; it was a matter of use and
wont. To maintain the organisation of society and the foundations of
aristocracy, it was necessary to retain the formula and merely to draw
from it the moral consequences implied in the principle of equality of
rights.
Up to that time the morality of marriage had been regulated by the
authority or even the caprice of the husband. A bastard (provided he was
begotten by the husband) had almost the status of a legitimate child;
in many cases he was bred at the paternal hearth, away from his mother,
under the charge of his father’s wife; and in Italy he very easily
secured legitimation,[306] and, if other heirs failed, carried on the
family. What was much worse than deceiving his wife, the husband believed
he had the right to neglect her. From that time forward retaliation
appeared to be the guiding principle; instead of remaining head-nurses,
of adopting children from heaven knows where, of toiling to efface all
signs of the caprices of their lords and masters, women “unhappily
married” no longer saw the necessity of fettering themselves, of refusing
their share of happiness, of carefully guarding what was despised.
Luther gave material fixity to this principle by permitting divorce;
he maintained marriage, but at the same time allowed re-marriage; in
other words, he retrograded as far as possible towards the manners of
the past. In case of default, even involuntary, on the part of one of
the contracting parties, he thought it quite right to replace “Vashti by
Esther.” We know what fortune attended these ideas. Melander,[307] when
blessing a “duplicate” marriage of the Landgrave of Hesse, proceeded to
say that everything in this world wears out, and that monogamy had had
its day. A book of extremely liberal views attributed to Bugenhagen[308]
adduced examples of bigamy among the early Christians. Polygamy met with
some support; near the end of his life, Ochino[309] became its advocate.
The platonists, however, allowed no retouching. The ancient doctrine that
the body, with all its weaknesses and infirmities, received with marriage
an indelible brand, as in former days convicts were marked, after all
seemed to them to be salutary, since the end of marriage was obedience to
the physical law “increase and multiply.” But, the law once fulfilled,
by what strange aberration did they wish to bind souls to this abandoned
body, truly a derelict of life? So far as heart and soul were concerned,
the community of women (or rather, the community of men) seemed a moral
reality, constituting indeed the clearest distinction that could be
drawn between mankind and the animals. This “spiritual libertinage” was
condemned. Calvin flouted it and preferred divorce—a singular taste,
not very refined, eminently worthy of countries where fleshly love was
cultivated, with rope-ladders and without platonism.[310] Wedlock has its
good points, but, as everyone knows, it is never supremely delightful;
love ought to be a delight and a religion. The wife, stepping forth in
her turn into life, has a right to think a little about herself and
her highest needs, to cultivate her heart and soul, to blossom out and
complete herself. “Complete herself!” some one will say: “then ’tis a
question of a subsidiary marriage?” Yes, but of a marriage wholly moral,
in which the carnal concessions are purely aesthetic and ostensible,—in
which she boasts (so far as essential points are concerned) of a
platonism as perfect in regard to her lover as in regard to her husband.
In the year of grace 1523, a young lady of the Roman aristocracy, whom
history names Costanza Amaretta, pretty, refined, and pious, made a
journey of devotion to Florence for the Easter festivals, and there met
her ideal in the shape of a cultivated and distinguished man named
Celso. They lived together under the same roof in perfect chastity.
When Easter was past, they set out with four kindred spirits for a
country house of Celso’s, and there, in the joyous spring weather,
among the cypresses and tufted pines and early flowers, this idyllic
society of platonists gave themselves up to the delights of poetising
and philosophising at large. Costanza, elected queen of the coterie,
unbosomed herself to them. She had been married when very young, as
the custom was, to a man of business with little of the ethereal in
his composition—a man of eminently practical mind, and manners almost
intolerable. With him she had contracted no real moral ties. “But for
this man’s desire of having children by me—for he thought me beautiful—we
should have felt nothing but hatred for each other.” In Celso’s company,
however, the path of virtue seems to Costanza covered with roses instead
of thorns, and hence to-day her eyes are opened to the truth, she
perceives with perfect clearness the moral utility of the platonist
distinction between the two kinds of love, the one bestial, matrimonial,
fraught with peril, a thing of this world, perishable,—the other
celestial, life-giving, a foretaste of Paradise, a love that enraptures
the soul and fills it in truth with a radiance divine.
Perfect lovers thus found perfect pleasure in making an offering, but
not a sacrifice, of their flesh—in deliberately lifting themselves
above gross physical rules and living delicately as angels incarnate.
Castiglione with extravagant eulogy reminds us of the wonderful feat
accomplished by two of these dilettanti of love, who spent six months in
conjugal intimacy and perfect continence; that was what he calls love,
the ideal existence, pure beauty! There was even, at Milan, a religious
order devoted to the mutual edification of the sexes on these lines, but
after a time the archbishop decreed its dissolution.[311]
Truth to tell, we do not know exactly how far this species of platonism
extended; it is a land difficult to map out; in such matters no
statistics are available, and even in these days when we can reel off the
number of bushels of wheat or dozens of eggs France can produce in any
month, there is no official return on the virtue of women.
But we are not indisposed to believe that the platonic life _à deux_
numbered more adepts than might be imagined. So many women of loveless
heart aspired to the happiness of finding for it some safe repository,
and regarded the body as so much dross, infinitely inferior. The example
of Judith struck them as not only above criticism, but sublime. If one
had groaned under the burden of the first marriage, surely it was all the
more needful to set the second upon a pedestal, and so to preserve above
everything the illusions, the dreams, the anticipations, however vague,
which bring us out of moral and physical distress into light and life!
The young platonist lady, all soul, who lived in the arms of her lover
and relinquished nothing but her soul, fancied that she was realising a
holy and religious dream; love, which purifies all things, wafted her
in peace and confidence towards the celestial spheres; for faith, hope,
love—what are they but the sheet anchors of the soul? That was her whole
position. If by this means she could enter into fulness of life, was she
so very foolish in availing herself of it?
Unhappily, love sought as a rule only its own abasement, and the mission
of these fair apostles declared itself rather in aggressive sallies than
in spiritual edification. Platonism had to come down a peg, and to meet
the demands of men it had to turn distrustful, descend to trivialities
and deceit,—to place reliance on artifice. Thus was born a new species of
platonism—more popular, and more open to criticism in point of morality.
This secondary art of platonism was hardly known beyond the borders of
Italy; it demanded a patience and a consummate suppleness which we do not
possess. The impatience of Frenchmen in matters of love was proverbial;
they would rather seize than woo; they would boil and chafe, utterly
unable to appreciate the wily tactics of Ovid or Martial, very often
expecting to begin at the end without any preliminary finessing, and
making flirtation altogether impossible. And Frenchwomen, too,—must we
confess it?—were but poor hands at the game. Some of them caught fire
instead of winning love without loving, and there were young girls like
Mademoiselle de Piennes who wrung their hands before the whole Court in
despair at a lover’s desertion. The French were so constituted; they
applied principles they did not possess, while the Italians excelled in
holding principles without applying them. And thus, whatever else they
did, the former were not very successful in finding salvation through
chimerical ideals, and virtue had infinite trouble to convince them of
her intoxicating charm: they could not manage to persuade themselves that
stones and arabesques are man’s proper sustenance, but remained faithful
to the realities they knew through the senses. Everything else was only
ridiculed, and, as few women are insensible to mockery and a cutting
phrase, the ladies were sometimes led where their own hearts would not
have taken them.
Platonic love, then, was regarded in France as a complicated business.
The women had to confess that no means had yet been discovered of
crystallising the things of life apart from the dispensation of
Providence which has given us bodies, nor of curbing men by the mere
vision of the ideal.
So, as we have seen, Margaret of France strove to make her body the
transparent vesture of her soul. We have seen, too, what tender
familiarities the ladies authorised at their morning toilet, and at other
times.
Modesty to them consisted not in the more or less brutal systems of the
“all in all or not at all,” but simply in remaining women.
Chary of making a confidant of doctor or chaplain, because unwilling
to subject themselves to either, they valued the man who regarded them
as women and had eyes only for them; as a reward for his exclusive
attentions they certainly thought they owed him some little privilege
beyond what they allowed to others. It was they who were the doctors, the
confessors, or rather the rescuers; they sprang into the water to save
the drowning man. To save him by bestowing on him the true gift, a little
of themselves, appeared to them a good, a moral, a meritorious work! This
was far, you perceive, from the commonplace, masculine handshake which
women nowadays grant to all and sundry! Seriously, they fancied they were
thus winning heaven; their own hearts constantly heard echoes of the
sweet strains of Plato’s _Phaedo_ or _Crito_; his exquisite distinction
between soul and body made music in their ears, and the familiar spirit
of Socrates bound them to an immaterial world, whispering his counsels
and intuitions.[312] They saw no harm in bestowing their indulgent
favour, their smile, and a little more. It was enough for them “to hold
fast unto the end,” and to remain firm as rock on the essential; they
were innocent of “false scruples,” and would have thought it cruel and
ridiculous to torture a man by refusing him “familiarities that Nature
has permitted to beauties,” now that this small change cost them so
little, and above all touched them so little. Ah! that was not where the
temptation lay! At the bottom of their hearts, how they despised the
shallow, insignificant men who, with their large and canting talk of love
and sentiment, could be caught like gudgeon with this paltry physical
lure!
The critics of a certain lady went so far as to accuse her of “losing all
shame,” because when receiving one of her friends, as she lay in bed in
the morning, she tolerated not a few familiarities, “without any offence
to my honour,” as she observed. She replied with heat that she saw in
her conduct nothing but what was excellent; her friend would esteem
her doubly for having seen body and soul united in her “in one strain
of chaste beauty.” As to the danger of this familiarity, listen to her
subtle and delicious reply: “The man I love, the man I dread is not he;
it is another who has laid siege, not to my body, but to my soul. Ah! if
I did not keep a rein on my heart, it would long ago have spoken to me
in favour of the other man!”[313] This is the cry of the fastidious woman
who dreads only the rape of the mind! We do not discuss her moral scheme,
we pass no judgment; we confine ourselves to relating.[314] Her end was
to make herself loved, and in a manner which would be worth the trouble.
It is not hard to believe that the bounds were sometimes overstepped:
some men abused their privileges, especially with regard to princesses
of literature like Louise Labé;[315] and sometimes it happened, indeed,
that cries a little too genuine broke from the lips of women, and were
heard above this tender, philosophic poetry, and this scorn of earth. Yet
many women, in their devotion for spreading pure happiness, for holding
men captive lest they sold themselves, would often have preferred that
conversation should be the sum total of their intercourse, and that their
friends should be content to dip in their eyes and their soul.
Their aim was to reduce everything to conversation; they had little
love for a contemplative silence, for songs without words: conversation
allowed opportunities of probing, caressing, penetrating the soul,
turning it inside out without the least inconvenience and with many
benefits. Among close friends they showed their art by getting someone
to sing to them the old cantilena, “I die of thirst beside the gushing
fount”; sometimes they held under their eyelids a large unsuspected tear.
They made a hungry man forget his food; “they contented their lovers with
words, promised a reward, and deferred it till to-morrow.”
The Italians, as we have said, delighted in tasting love thus at leisure
in little sugared sips; they were not gluttons like the French: they
appeared born, not to construct railways or to inflate balloons, but
simply to love, to love loving, to nourish themselves on futilities and
surprises, to sing always the same meaningless song. They cut marvellous
figures at the feet of those women “before whom desire burnt away like
candles at a shrine”; they glossed over realities, as if they really
believed more in happiness that came from the unknown than from the
known, as the great scorner of women, La Rochefoucauld, has well said;
to such an extent that the inexhaustible springs of the heart were
sufficiently depleted, so far as they were concerned, to spare them the
risk of embarrassment from love, and to enable them safely to find the
recreation necessary to the overtaxed human mind. Happy creatures, these
men without a care! The narrow world in which they fluttered seemed too
big for them, and their long wings touched the ground; they were young,
yet old; they were gay with brilliant, yet faded colours; a woman could
take their arm in complete confidence that all would end where it began.
Life was for them one aimless flirtation, a mere battle of flowers.
Love, as thus carried to extreme perfection in society, came in for no
little mockery. No one was under any illusion as to the impossibility
of finding in it a secret source of strength and life; it was a mere
avocation, a little intellectual pastime—with no overpowering demand on
the intellect.
The Italian “cicisbeo” or “death of love” became a sort of amiable
spectre, a harmless necessary cat; he was practically non-existent to his
friends, and had the right of not answering his letters. Sweetly scented,
with a well-hosed leg, a rose in his hand and a flower at his ear, his
lips pursed up, his bearing graceful and gallant, at his heels a lackey
whose duty was to flick off the least speck of dust—there you have him,
always the same, whoever the object of his passion. All he troubled about
was rightly to place his glances and sighs, his nods and salutations, and
when he had been rewarded with a gracious smile or an arch look, he would
go off humming to indite a sextain or a madrigal.
The mawkish execrable creature! more womanish than women, a woman
spoilt in the making, a half-woman! Sticking like a shadow to the
lady of his thoughts, his functions were to carry her lapdog, her
prayer-book, or what else she pleased. At her house he installed himself
as the centrepiece of her receptions, kept the conversation alive, and
overwhelmed the husband with affectionate attentions.
He was a hypocrite, a rakish fop! In the Roman aristocracy he usually
took the shape of a sanctimonious recluse; at Naples he was a man of
energy and go; at Venice a man of mystery; in Lombardy he had the joyous
self-assurance of the North;[316] at Florence he was a vivacious talker,
responding to the challenges of silvery voices with audacious quips.
He took everything as it came; he had not an ounce of sincerity: his
cleverness consisted first in adapting himself entirely to the beloved
object, in abdicating all individuality, in being hers and hers alone;
secondly, in proceeding platonically and without passion, with extreme
prudence, trusting to suavity and tenderness, always securing a line of
retreat, and striving above all to melt the obdurate heart. In all this
part of the programme the eyes often were better servants than the tongue.
This point rounded, every man for himself! An eclectic, a hot lover, an
abstract philosopher, a symbolist, an idealist—let him be any of these if
his heart bids him. He is a fine talker; well, ’tis a great talent, which
will permit him to turn to account a thousand little incidents, but will
often (let him not deceive himself) lead to only superficial successes. A
wary woman holds fine talkers in awe; with them, she thinks, there is all
the making of domestic broils; she knows how indiscreet they are, and she
smiles on them and keeps them at a distance, knowing that this is the way
to set them proclaiming her virtue abroad. Often she prefers a taciturn,
above all a bashful man, “a lenten lover,” as someone said, easy to
feed.[317]
But it is impossible to enumerate all the eccentricities that were part
and parcel of this flirtation. The ridiculous became the rule: it was
an afflicting spectacle for human dignity. Old men cut capers, young
men lost their heads, the witty turned imbecile, the imbecile set up
for wits. What a masquerade! The lugubrious blubbered about their love,
sighed in prose and verse; the sincere embraced a whimsey—adopted a
colour, for instance. One of these, having vowed himself to green, so
strictly embargoed the rest of the spectrum that not only was everything
on him green, even to his shirt-buttons, but he ate out of none but green
plates, drank out of none but greenish glasses, never rested till he had
discovered green bread, and made green meadows and groves the exclusive
burden of his song.
Happily, conversation somewhat raised the level of this extravagant
and lamentable affectation. Surrounded by a circle of friends, a man
would amuse himself by launching a graceful declaration concealed in an
aphorism or a double entendre; it sometimes happened that a lady who
had never entered the speaker’s head fancied that hers was the heart
aimed at, and that was provocative of fun. Or perhaps they would linger
out the pleasure of a tête-à-tête reel off their witticisms[318] and
amiable compliments, and unravel little puzzles in sentimental casuistry.
Sometimes they reached the stage where the tête-à-tête that was really
delightful was one in which neither said a word.
Here some one will stop us and ask whether all this did not have an end.
Bless you, no! An end was in no wise necessary; genuine platonic romances
never end.[319] And what years and years they may last! A clever woman
excels precisely in spinning them out; if she feels that the fire is
burning low, she has a thousand means of fanning it into flame—a word,
a tender gesture,[320] a little present, a gracious act here, a secret
gentleness there, a touch of jealousy; and then she suggests that you
should recommence the little game—church, the park, sighs, tears, oaths.
And thus you may go on for ever.
There are, however, some romances which do end, well or ill. As a rule
the event is announced by rolling clouds and a lightning-flash. The
majority of men only enter the platonic life with the idea of an early
departure, and implicitly believe that in the life of every woman—even
though she be a “dragon”—there is one inevitable, irrefragable hour.
Psychologists, philosophers, poets, preachers[321] all have repeated
_ad nauseam_ the saying of Ovid: “A chaste woman is she whom none has
tempted,”[322] or, as La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère will phrase it
later: “An insensible woman is she who has not yet found the man she must
love.”
The lady affects not to see the storm brewing; she bears up against it
gallantly; gentle banter is her cue; she declares that talk of love is
very pleasant to her, but ’tis well known among decent people what that
word signifies; there is no question of a coarse, sensual love, but only
of amorous discourses. The man gives himself up to demonstrating his love
anew; his plaints become louder, his tears more copious; his lady-love
never gets to sleep o’ nights without hearing serenades or “Spanish
lamentations” beneath her window, or sighs that would seem belled out
by some familiar spirit, but which are really a performance got up by
obliging neighbours, for a consideration. All day, at church, in the
ballroom, in the street, under the thin disguise of masks, he is here,
there and everywhere, never out of her sight.
One morning the maid announces to her mistress that the gentleman is
at the door with something most urgent to say—here he is, indeed,
pushing past the girl; and he will be eloquent, you may be sure. Or
he resorts to the grand means of melodrama—false keys, rope-ladders,
narcotics, sorcery, lying confessions of apostate monks; or to the
stale and hackneyed devices of comedy; he enlarges eloquently on his
high qualities, proffers a thousand services, and even opens his purse;
full of promises the while, erecting beautiful castles in the air. One
will employ menace, another will boldly haggle and argue with father
or husband. What a warmth of language, what sighing and sobbing, what
fretting and fuming! “Fulvia being come on horseback to see me, I
straightway feigned a superb wrath, as though her action seemed to me
that of too forward a minx. And this fine choler of mine was of great
avail in my courting.” There are some who carry the fortress by dint of
lavish praises, superlative verses, outbursts of jealousy. Others by
continual dropping wear away the stone.
If a princess had the idea that her rank would prove a sufficient rampart
against this final assault, she had to find out her mistake, especially
in France. Why should not the man she loved—the dear good fellow!—after
so many labours, and discreet frenzies, and stratagems, and covert
approaches, expect an advancement he so well deserved?
A bien servir et loyal estre,
De serviteur on devient maistre![323]
“Madam,” proudly says one of the young nobles of Margaret of France,
“when our mistresses stand on their dignity in halls and assemblies,
seated at their ease as our judges, we are on our knees before them;
we lead them out to dance with fear and trembling; we serve them so
sedulously as to anticipate their requests; we seem to be so fearful of
offending them and so desirous of doing them service that those who see
us have pity on us, and very often esteem us more simple than foolish,”
and sing the praises of ladies able thus to win service. “But when we
are by ourselves, and love alone doth mark our looks, we know right well
that they are women and we are men, and then the name of liege lady is
converted into sweetheart, and the name of servitor into lover.”[324]
And it need not be supposed that in such circumstances they remained
satisfied with words or menaces, even in dealing with ladies of the most
exalted station. There were violent characters who stuck at nothing,
like Bonnivet! It also happened at critical moments, even in the most
platonic of circles, that love turned into rage. “Unico Aretino,” one of
the Urbino talkers, upset by what he thought a piece of base ingratitude
on the part of the charming duchess Elizabeth, got so beside himself
with anger as to call his sovereign lady “Urbino’s traitress, witch,
trickster.” (Aretino was an exceedingly clever man, but after all he was
only the fourth part of a prelate; he filled at Rome the fourth-rate
office of “apostolic abbreviator,” and pretty badly at that; but as
he afforded the Sacred College a deal of amusement he was licensed to
indulge in all sorts of jocularities.) He never forgave the duchess, and
even after her death pursued both her and her daughter with persistent
rancour.[325]
The ideas of men in these matters simply beggar imagination. They fancied
that they erred on the side of bashfulness, that they suffered wrong when
ladies suggested “reckonings,” to use their term. They thought it would
be ridiculous to die of despair like the heroes of romance, and that it
was “folly and cruelty” to praise the beauty of a fountain to a poor,
thirsty fellow and then kill him because he wished to drink.[326] “Whom
will you get to believe,” cries Henri d’Albret, “that we ought to die
for women, who were made for us, and that we should hesitate to require
of them what God bids them give us?”[327] That was the conclusion that
must be expected: everyone knows, in Calvin’s words, whither “all roads”
lead. So a woman was neither surprised nor panic-stricken in the hour of
battle. She had taken or ought to have taken her precautions; her first
care, as we have said, was to distribute her favours. She went forth to
the fight with a gallantry which some old fogies called impudence; her
sins were no longer sins of omission, like those of her grandmothers.
And that she often triumphed there is no manner of doubt. Margaret of
France, at the turning-point of the battle, is found as firmly fixed on
principles as Anne of France. Billon assures us that in Normandy, a land
of pretty women, where he would not care to go bail for a single man, he
would not hesitate to name a very large number of women whose virtue he
could guarantee with every confidence. Assuredly there existed stainless
women,—just the women to play with fire!
But did they always come off scatheless? No one will believe it.
Further, it must be remarked that the point of view of casuistry had
changed. The body was, so to speak, the sign-manual of the soul; just as
the base, passionless, sensual vice prevalent in the world seemed ignoble
and disgusting, so it was remembered that love had a purifying power. The
merciful words of the Gospel were recalled, and, remarkably enough, it
was those who were most rigorous in regard to themselves who showed the
most indulgence towards an error springing from sincere affection.
Margaret of France spreads her nets, like the Gioconda, but for the good
of others, for she knows whither the mist-enveloped paths lead; she
cannot tear her eyes from the vast and gloomy background of life, and all
that passes in front of it inspires her at times with cruel loathing.
She loves mankind, but without the least touch of fetishism; to look
aloft and not believe in any individual man is the condition of her
love; her sole consolation is the thought that Italian morals are worse
than French. Her approval of a German husband, who had the fantastic
notion of locking his wife up along with the skeleton of her lover,[328]
was so exaggerated that all her friends were compelled to laugh. And
yet, when pulled up short about the ethics of love, and asked if the
sin is venial or worse, she gets a little muddled. Assuredly, nothing
is more “untuneable and harsh” among the joyous strains of the divine
concert than the frailty of the flesh: “truth compels us to condemn it”;
but is there any need to get huffy, to decline to see any extenuating
circumstances, because the spiders web that has been centuries aweaving
is rent by one dab of the paw—because, in spite of all the cooings and
flutings, no one has succeeded in turning men into big babies instead of
villains, or even (I go this length) because in the heat of the battle
some women may have lost their heads and gone over to the enemy? Is
the conclusion inevitable that the outcome of platonism is necessarily
evil—more evil than anything else?
How stood the fashionable ladies who rebelled against platonism?... On
the principle that “the honour of a man and that of a woman are the
same,” and that a wife, whether from love or vengeance, has a right
to the same independence as her husband, it was the husbands’ game to
wink at things. Far from making an outcry and playing the Othello, they
meditated philosophically on their own position[329] and the virtue
of silence, and, drawing in their horns with something of fatalism,
could not find fault with their wives for “using their power” as they
themselves did. It was rare for a husband to kill his wife; wedlock had
become a stagnant pool of mutual indulgence, in which unlawful love
was but an incident so long as it left no more trace than a pebble
cast into the surface slime, or a bird flitting through the air. As to
believing that Lauras or Beatrices could still exist, not only did the
sceptics deny it outright, but they even declared that if Laura or
Beatrice were to revisit the glimpses of the moon, great would be her
disillusionment.[330]
The only matter that Louise of Savoy troubled about was to keep things
dark.[331]
Can we wonder that, in an atmosphere so saturated with immorality, many
even of the best-intentioned women allowed themselves to drift with the
tide, or that Salel, the Attic friend of Margaret, represents them even
on the shore of Acheron as still enchained to ungovernable love, and
imploring pardon for their tyrant?
When they succumbed, it was with a sublimity of passion which the world
almost always misconstrued. “The fortress of the heart, where honour
dwells, was so battered that the poor lady granted what she was never
a whit inclined to refuse.”[332] “You mean to say, then,” says a lady,
“that all is lawful to those that love, provided no one knows?” “In good
sooth,” replies the other, “’tis only fools who are found out.”[333]
Their love, fashioned out of dreams, thus dissolves into reality. Pure
women, platonists armed at all points, let themselves go from a spirit
of gentleness (“for pity in their spirits rules”), from a tenderness of
compassion, out of charity toward others, if not for themselves. They are
almost martyrs of love or kindliness, since their kindliness goes such
lengths as to be taken for love, just as their love, reserved as it is,
may be taken for kindliness. Unlike the anti-platonists, though they may
perchance be surprised into a fault, they surprise no one, they commit
no follies. It is the fault of poor human nature that platonic love does
not remain always a “stork love,”[334] as Montaigne calls it. There is
never a battle but some dead and wounded are left on the field. Pity the
dead by all means, but the survivors are already inviting those who have
never sinned to cast the first stone!
A woman “so cozened,” concludes Castiglione philosophically,
unquestionably merits such indulgence as is accorded to _messieurs les
assassins_. She was toiling, as Michelangelo said, “to lift souls to
perfection. Sensuality slays the soul.”
And hence Margaret of France, in her profound yearning to blot out and
pardon the sins of the world, is herself inspired with a tender, helpful
tolerance. Assuredly the wounds she observes are deplorable, but they do
not necessarily point to absolute frowardness of heart; they may result
from a “naïve folly,” from “the misfortune of loving not wisely but too
well”; in other words, from an over-abundance of natural goodness, the
very consequence of our organisation. The perfect being would clearly be
an androgyne; but we are imperfect beings, an odd mixture, godlike, and
yet profoundly, lamentably human. The power of love
vient de la divinité,
Et son tourment de nostre humanité.[335]
We seem to hear this spotless woman crying to God: “O Christ, Christ of
the Magdalene, gasping and crucified, how Thou didst suffer, how Thou
didst love! This streaming blood, these wounds gaping eternally,—these
are the handiwork of the hate of men, whom Thou didst bid to love one
another with a pure heart. Thou wilt not pardon their hate! Thou wilt not
pardon their fierce lust of wealth, nor their pride and naughtiness of
heart, nor their wild anger, nor their shameful sloth of soul. Thou wilt
pardon nothing but the error of love, the error of a moment, since this
is but the overflow of the goodness Thyself hast given, the wofulness of
too great love!”
2. THE ENNOBLEMENT OF VICE.
The second moral effect of the theory of beauty and love was still more
pertinent than the first. It consisted in an extraordinary levelling up
of purely terrestrial and unlawful loves. From the principle, with which
we are already acquainted, that the virginity of the heart survives
the professional ordeals in which the heart has no concern, we shall
find that moral deductions were drawn, in Italy and even in France, so
important that we cannot pass them by in silence.
In Italy, among the women whose trade was pleasure, there was formed an
aristocracy so real that some of them presided over salons, were part and
parcel of the court world, and truly merited the name of “courtesans.”
Their bearing was irreproachable, their distinction extreme; we are bound
to say, indeed, that, apart from their origin, they were absolutely
indistinguishable from virtuous women—except that perhaps their manners
were a trifle more correct.
Their high influence is explained by the fact that in the official world
of Rome there was a plentiful lack of women. Etiquette required that
none but birds of passage should be seen at court, a restriction which
gave cruel but entirely honourable pain to the heart of more than one
platonic prelate. It was believed for a moment that the half-sister
of Leo X., Philiberta of Savoy, was about to take up her abode at the
Vatican: “God be praised!” cried Bibbiena exultantly, “all we lack is a
court with women!” This happiness was not realised; women continued to
be conspicuous by their absence. We see how it was that, in the supreme
sanctuary of human glory, in the Eternal City that served as beacon
to the world, the Ninons de l’Enclos,[336] for want of better women,
fulfilled in their own way a singular apostolic mission by playing the
part of court ladies, and by magnificently entertaining the pick of
poets, savants, artists, prelates and diplomatists, at a period when
every man plumed himself on bearing one of those labels and on sporting
it about some petticoat.
Bewitching pictures of the receptions of these ladies have been
bequeathed to us; many a poet who knew the world chiefly in this quarter
has vaunted with enthusiasm the aroma of grace pervading their noble
salons, the honour of admission to them, the relations established there,
the superb fêtes which consecrated their charm and set a seal upon the
connection. This was no new thing; Socrates and Pliny testify how keenly
the society of ancient Greece and Rome had felt the need of guidance
by women more deeply experienced in life and more naturally active
than high-born ladies are likely to be. To name these ladies Ninons de
l’Enclos, however, would be to give a very imperfect and mean idea of
them, for their influence was at once moral and intellectual. Doubtless
they could pretend to no virginity but that of the heart, but since that
was the better part, they honoured pure love quite as conscientiously,
if not more than others did. Energy of a very special and sincere kind
impelled them to react strongly against the scorn of a world they had an
equal right to scorn; and further, they felt the necessity of stopping
their ears if they were to save themselves from blank hopelessness, and
of setting up noble illusions about themselves.
Several of them were genuine patricians, whose only possible reproach was
a tincture of pride. One would flaunt her descent, which she possibly
traced back to the Colonna or even the Massimo[337]; another would
modestly sign herself “Roman patrician.” The entrée to their salons
was particularly difficult; some of them imposed somewhat rigorous
conditions, insisting for instance that a man should mount guard for
two months with the Swiss at the palace gate, or should pay his devoir
on his knees. The style of their houses and appointments left nothing
to be desired; they maintained an extreme decorum. It is not for us to
boast of their virtue: their talent consisted in being as virtuous as
possible and getting rich more particularly by way of legacies; it would
have been a great mistake to deal with them cavalierly. Tullia d’Aragona,
who thoughtlessly allowed some rather broad pasquinades to be addressed
to her, was unfortunate enough, on a visit with which she honoured the
court of Ferrara, to turn all the gentlemen’s heads. But the most diverse
ordeals found her inflexible; she rejected with indignation the miserable
offer of a golden necklace worth three hundred crowns. The daughter of
another of these ladies had been so excellently brought up that she has
a place among the martyrs of virtue and patriotism; she slew herself to
escape the importunities of the governor of Sienna.
They were queens of elegance, and never a brunette among them. At their
houses people discoursed most excellent music. They were great dancers.
They were the happy owners of fine jewels, fine pictures, fine statuary;
on their tables might be seen the newest books, choice editions,
sometimes adorned with a manuscript dedication in verse. They knew Greek
and Latin; they corresponded with their absent friends in gracious and
affectionate letters, Ciceronian in style, and with no lack of wit. In
conversation it required very little pressure to tap a bountiful spring
of elegant extracts from the classics—most often got second-hand from
Petrarch or Boccaccio—or even, on occasion, a learned disquisition on
Roman archaeology. Sometimes they shot out a phrase in the high pietistic
fashion of the day. What lady of recognised position could have written
more charming sonnets than Imperia or Veronica Franco?
They excelled in keeping wit in play: Aretino confesses that, without an
incentive of this sort, he would have been good for nothing. Occasionally
some poor devil was graciously permitted to give a taste of his quality,
but, as a rule, the mistress of the house preferred to inspire men who
had well-lined purses. Yes, it was a grave and distinguished society,
and if sometimes the conversation touched on subjects but indifferently
mystical, what immaculate drawing-room but was open to the same reproach?
On saints’ days these ladies went to pay their devotions at the
neighbouring basilica, and if they were not very devout they were at
any rate beautifully dressed. Their accustomed air of good breeding and
conscious dignity, which drove many ladies to despair, gave them genuine
rank, and made them the indispensable ornaments of important festivities.
Thus several of them lent lustre to the magnificent reception given in
1513 by the Cardinal of Mantua to young Federico Gonzaga, then in his
fourteenth year, as he passed through on the way to Rome. In truth,
there were some who behaved exactly like high-born dames, and were
pre-eminent in all deeds of devotion, whole-hearted love, and even
disinterestedness. Poets innumerable have vouched for their virtue.
Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo dedicated sonnets to them.
Not infrequently they ended their days in the odour of piety, and were
buried in the churches[338]; to this day prayers are offered in the
shadow of their tombs. Michelangelo wrote an epitaph for one of them.
Others prosaically married men of the world, and these ladies, as a rule,
took rather a superior pride in their virtue and their coat-of-arms. A
clever woman of the time philosophically hit off the subject: “Life is a
comedy: so long as the last act is successful, the whole piece is fine.”
Nevertheless these interesting creatures necessarily had their
detractors. They have been accused of trickery and deception. With all
allowance for the prejudice of their enemies, it cannot be denied that
eccentricities here and there gave a handle to the slanderers. The lady,
for instance, who wore slippers covered with diamonds, and made men
kiss her feet (like the pope), alleging that her foot too was beautiful
enough to merit adoration, was considered to have overstepped the
bounds. But with the general public, and even with connoisseurs, such
dainty exactions did not produce the same astonishment that they would
produce to-day. The religion of beauty touched such deep chords that the
beautiful appeared always beautiful under all forms, so much so that in
certain Italian collections of “Lives of illustrious women,” saints and
courtesans stand cheek by jowl.
Men professed for these ladies the same veneration and idolatrous respect
as for a princess; they plied them with the same sighs, the same verses,
the same little tendernesses. The game cost a little dearer, but in
reality they were not unwilling to regard a courtesan’s drawing-room as
more moral than certain reputable drawing-rooms, since a man was not
likely to meet a ridiculous husband there, or embarrassing young cousins
of both sexes, or certain fashionable girls whose tongues had a tang. And
it was much less compromising.
Was there a moral advantage in elevating what had till then been so
degraded? For a long time it was sincerely believed there was, and
this belief was held almost throughout Italy. On this point it is
sufficient to read a very curious letter addressed by some unknown
person, concealing himself under the pseudonym “Apollo,” to the witty and
eminently virtuous Isabella d’Este. It is dated Ferrara, June 13, 1537,
and refers to a visit then being paid to the city by Tullia d’Aragona.
It runs: “There has just arrived here a very pretty lady, so staid in
deportment, so fascinating in manner, that we cannot help finding in her
something truly divine. She sings all sorts of airs and motets at sight;
her conversation has matchless charm; she knows everything, and there
is nothing you cannot talk to her about. There is no one here to hold
a candle to her, not even the Marchioness of Pescara.” An ambassador
exceeded even these rhapsodies, and wrote gravely to his government that
he was composing his despatches under the eye of this pretty woman, who
assisted him with her advice.
Tullia d’Aragona, who was, we may remark, very proud of the noble blood
in her veins, thus played Egeria to the most exalted personages, and
they had no hesitation in comparing her to a mother of the church like
Vittoria Colonna, or in placing her even higher. She justified this
enthusiasm, not only by her physical beauty and her wit, but by real
moral qualities. She proved that the spirit of the beautiful elevates the
basest things, and if she did not turn Trappist, if she continued to live
the life she was born to, she brought to it a contempt of money which was
itself a purifying virtue. This admirable creature, after holding all
Italy spellbound by the charm of her velvety eyes, died in destitution;
she gave instructions that she should be buried in the quietest way
beside her poor mother in the church of Sant Agostino, where she had
endowed masses; her belongings had to be sold by auction, and they
realised twelve crowns and a half.
Imperia attained even a higher place than Tullia, and we are compelled
to believe that the aegis of virtue, like charity, can cover a multitude
of sins, since we find Sadoleto, the type of sincere piety, singing the
praises of this amiable woman, and Raphael setting her, so it is said, at
the foot of his Parnassus in the apartments of Julius II.
We do not know (and it is almost better so) what Imperia had done to
excite so general an enthusiasm: she died at twenty-six! All that we know
is that August 15, 1511, the day of her death, was observed at Rome as a
day of public mourning. On her tomb was engraved an epitaph in the purest
lapidary style. The poets, maybe with a very subtle irony, lauded her to
the skies as a new goddess of Latium: we hardly need to repeat these fine
phrases. “Our fathers mourned the Empire (_Imperium_); we mourn Imperia.
They had lost the world: we have lost our hearts, our very selves.” “The
whole city was moved when this young deity was snatched away on Tiber
banks,” exclaims Vitalis—“the whole city, even the old pagan walls, even
the _fasti_ of the consuls!” “No longer is she beneath this marble,”
cries Silvanus; “henceforth she holds her place among the constellations,
she will guide our fleets.” But Silvanus becomes a little mixed in his
mythology, and in connection with the new star unaccountably couples the
names of Julius II. and Jupiter.
For all this glory and honour, Imperia and her kind inevitably became
rather burdensome, and the most aesthetic of the popes, Leo X., struck
them a fatal blow when he expelled them from Rome in 1520. They took
refuge at Venice, despite the heroic opposition of the senate.
But at Venice they lost all their peculiar charm: Venice, the metropolis
of pleasure, “the foam of the sea,” set its stamp upon them. Venice
was the earthly paradise of matter-of-fact folk like Brantôme and
Aretino. The latter wrote to an amiable lady: “You cannot picture these
water-parties in the open air, these coaching expeditions on _terra
firma_, these secluded groves, these banquets, these unaccustomed
consolations.... From your windows you will have a panorama of musicians,
singers and buffoons,” a tempest of pleasure. “You would fancy yourself a
queen.” But at Venice such queens did not govern, as at Rome; men added
them to their collection, that was all.
Thus disappeared one of the most striking curiosities of the platonist
society,—the one which has left the most vivid memories. It was only
possible under the caressing warmth of the Roman sky.
Leo’s decree evoked loud cries of distress, and the loudest of all
came from the French, who, though they had never understood this art
of harlotry and had made great fun of it, thought it a capital thing
all the same. Rome, they as good as said, was no longer Rome: “How
doleful the Jubilee will be!” cries a pilgrim: “what shall I do in
Rome now?” Du Bellay, while a melancholy guest of the gloom-beclouded
city, apostrophised this new ruin in well-known verses. (O Rome, sad,
tender Rome, to whom every passing generation must needs bequeath a
new triumphal arch, new catacombs!) Many years later, distinguished
travellers like Henri III. and Montaigne did their best to hunt up the
last of the courtesans.
We cannot but confess that the attempt to rehabilitate the demi-monde
and to employ it in the heavenward voyage strikes us as extremely
venturesome; the younger Dumas, like a true Frenchman, was not bold
enough to persevere. Our ancestors felt the same qualms: unhappily, it
was not from virtuous scruples. They recognised the work accomplished by
platonism, so bent were they on transfiguring love through coquetry,[339]
and so hopeful, in the interests of humanity, of rendering virtuous women
more come-at-able. But when it was suggested to them, as necessary to
complete their work, that they should render come-at-able women more
virtuous, they were steadfast as rock.
They discovered another way of giving an aristocratic stamp to things
that could not be spiritualised. We are bound to touch upon it, because
this also throws back a vague reflexion of platonism; besides, in
approaching these delicate problems in morality, which it is so expedient
to look at dispassionately, we have no intention of dedicating our work
to girls.
It was sought to blend the idea of an immaterial union of hearts—an
idea borrowed from platonism, and one whose beauty and importance were
not disputed—with the other idea that such a compact must necessarily
be sealed by an absolute and unreserved intimacy, or it would remain
chimerical and oppressive. This idea the French could not part with;
and consequently there arose the notion of what may be called a second
marriage, supplementary to the authorised marriage—a union _de facto_,
recognised, acknowledged, declared, and so highly honoured that one would
be tempted to call it an eighth sacrament. Similar unions, recognised
by the world, were still known at the end of the 18th century, and even
under the Restoration during the early years of the 19th, having survived
the worst trials of the Revolution, the Emigration, penury, and exile, to
say nothing of the still more ruthless test of time.
This custom of giving publicity to secret unions was not a direct
outgrowth of platonism; yet platonist women looked on it by no means
unfavourably. In the first place, they thought it rather lucky that their
husbands, enjoying an irregularity in some sort regularised, more highly
respected their wives’ dignity, quiet and health.[340] Secondly, we have
already shown how little platonism there was in morals under Francis
I., and what unbridled licence reigned at court. Melin de Saint-Gelais
portrays the king as a cock in a hen-run—or as a sun in a firmament of
stars, amid Canaples, star of the morning; the lovely Saint-Paul, star of
evening; Diana, the crescent-moon; and many other stellar beauties eager
to shine—Helly, Rieux, Tallard, Lestrange—who, if their names were not
mentioned, “would have thought it strange.”
Francis I. said plainly that a man without a mistress was only a
nincompoop. In that case was it not a mark of progress to arrive at
the institution of a regular mistress, recognised and with no rivals?
Margaret of France would have been only too glad to see her brother fix
his affections prudently on some eminent lady, who would rank next the
queen and might be called the queen and “mirror of all propriety.” That
explains, no doubt, the affectionate, obsequious, humble welcome she gave
to the duchess d’Etampes, whose reign seemed for a moment likely to be
lasting. She wrote for this noble lady the _Coche_ or _Débat d’Amour_, a
little treatise intended to prove that, apart from pure platonism, there
can still exist a laudable love; and in the presentation copy Margaret,
the king’s sister, had herself represented, in complete black, before the
queen of the day in all the brilliance of her beauty and her jewels, and
saying to her: “_Plus vous que moy_”; in other words, “You are more than
I.”
With a like feeling of feminine delicacy, perhaps somewhat exaggerated,
Veronica Gambara, who was probably virtuous and quite certainly platonic,
went into raptures over the good fortune of the “siren” who succeeded in
holding for some time the volatile heart of Aretino; the words of Laura
and Beatrice rose instantly to her lips, as if the ideal were on the
point of attainment.
Henri II. showed himself a platonist in this sense; his double
establishment did not constitute an infidelity. He was faithful to two
wives, one official, responsible for perpetuating his dynasty and acting
for him in affairs, after the old tradition; the other personal, to
satisfy his heart as a man.
Diana of Poitiers, it must be admitted, besides her beauty which
long retained its ripeness, had all the qualities for beguiling and
captivating a lofty heart—birth almost as good as the queen’s (who was
only a Medici), wit, warm-heartedness, self-devotion. She has herself
explained, in excellent verse, how her position, false as it seems to us,
was born of a genuine passion. One fine morning, she tells us, a young
Cupid in all his fresh, light-footed, bashful youth came roaming in her
neighbourhood, filling her mantle with marjoram and jonquilles, casting a
spell upon her. She resisted, shutting eyes and ears against him, though
she felt her heart melting; she would listen to no promises, no oaths.
He held out to her a wonderful laurel wreath, a queen’s crown. “No,” she
replied, “better far be good than a queen,” and yet she felt herself
“thrilling and trembling.”
Et comprendrez sans peine
Duquel matin je prétends reparler.[341]
Love did not speak her false: he offered her a kingdom, a great part to
play, and kept his word, as the walls of the Louvre testify. To all her
contemporaries the position of Diana appeared magnificent, divine. Du
Bellay has sung of it as the most beautiful of marriages, the marriage of
true minds:
Dieu vous a fait entre nous
Comme un miracle apparoistre,
Afin que de ce grand Roy,
D’une inviolable foy,
Vous peussiez posséder l’âme,
Et que son affection,
Par vostre perfection,
Brulast d’une sainte flamme.
Les Roys monstrent aux humains
De Dieu l’exemple et l’image.[342]
To the French, this was the perfect type of platonism, at once practical
and sacred.
Vous avez acquis le cœur de toute la France.[343]
And Ronsard is not less explicit:
Seray-je seul, vivant en France de vostre âge,
Sans chanter vostre nom, si craint et si puissant?
Diray-je point l’honneur de vostre beau croissant?
Feray-je point pour vous quelque immortel ouvrage?[344]
In spite of all these dithyrambs, it is very clear that the platonism of
Diana of Poitiers is a sign of decadence. It was the ideal of platonist
women to be loved for their soul; men’s ideal being the opposite, there
had been a compromise.[345]
The compromise, indeed, was greater than they were willing to admit, even
in Italy, and in the purest centres of platonism. Our readers are already
acquainted with the charming Bembo, the quintessence of platonism, the
admirable chiseller of phrases, the secretary of Leo X., the friend of
everything beautiful, noble and aesthetic, the magnificent collector,
the apostle of Plato and Petrarch, of Boccaccio and Dante, the idol
of the ladies, in short, one of the men who clung to the skirts of
princesses, parading their everlasting sentimentalities under the most
perfect, exquisite, elevated form. We have a moving letter of his. Among
that numerous bevy of princesses who nourished him on ethereal glances
from their bright eyes, there was one he loved, the Morosina, a pure
and charming woman, to whom, as Monsignor Beccadelli has said, “he had
the good sense to devote himself,”[346] and who had given him, in the
most common, everyday fashion, a goodly number of children. He lost her.
The unhappy man was stricken to the core; his whole being bled. What a
state in which to find the divine Bembo, the prophet of the celestial
felicities! Death has plunged a knife into his heart. Love—yes, he too
had loved. He unbosoms himself to one of his friends, Gabriele Trifon.
We were struck with surprise when we first came upon the letter; it was
the intimate revelation of a soul; a Bembo of real flesh and blood,
grief-stricken, palpitating. “You,” he writes, “have softened the anguish
which overwhelms me, in speaking to me as a man, not as a philosopher
platonic and divine.”
He adds that he has sought to reason with himself, to preach himself
lessons of wisdom, to find relief in his passion for work; but the most
delightful book slips from his hand. Between the book and his eyes the
sweet image re-appears to him in a mist of tears; and as he makes this
confession, tears gush out afresh and soil the paper, his heart is
stripped bare; the whole man is before us. “I have lost the dearest heart
in the world, a heart which tenderly watched over my life, which loved
it and sustained it neglectful of its own; a heart so much the master
of itself, so disdainful of vain embellishments and adornments, of silk
and gold, of jewels and treasures of price, that it was content with the
single and (so she assured me) supreme joy of the love I bore it. This
heart, moreover, had for vesture the softest, gracefulest, daintiest of
limbs; it had at its service pleasant features, and the sweetest, most
graciously endowed form that I have ever met in this country. I cannot
forbear lamenting, I cannot but curse the stars that have deprived us of
enjoying each other in so innocent a life.”
What a singular underside of platonism! What a warmth of grief! Where
is all the platonic paraphernalia—the beautiful ladies all smiles and
ice, the careless disdain of physical beauty, the adoration of social
life, the horror of solitude? Where are the many-faceted phrases, the
philosophic dissertations? Bembo has turned pious like all the unhappy;
he will not accuse Providence unjustly; though it has snatched happiness
from him, he gives thanks for the happiness enjoyed. But sentiments
are not snapped in a moment—sentiments “which with time have rooted
themselves so deeply in our humanity that ’twould seem impossible to
eradicate them.” He writes, effusively, thanking the friend whom he knew
to have been bound by genuine friendship “to this beautiful and precious
lady.” He speaks of the children; he will care for them, since he is
their father, and because ere she died the Morosina, having fulfilled her
religious duties, had faintly whispered these words, which pierced his
soul like a hot iron: “‘I commend our sons to you, and beseech you to
have care of them, both for my sake and for yours. Be sure they are your
own, for I have never done you wrong; that is why I could take our Lord’s
body just now with soul at peace.’ Then after a long pause she added:
‘Rest with God,’ and a few minutes afterwards closed her eyes for ever,
those eyes which had been the clear-shining faithful stars of my weary
pilgrimage through life.”
Ah, these tears! They had hearts, then, these fashionable platonists.
Never in any of his fine discourses has Bembo touched us, nor even (if
we may say so) rejoiced us as by this simple stifled cry, these tears
of solitude. He is prone upon the earth, having lost the wings that
bore him on from flower to flower.... Four years after the death of the
Morosina, we find that, despite his good resolutions and the counsels of
his friends, he is as profoundly crushed as on the first day. He seeks
consolation from poetry; he has begun a canzone on the death of his “fair
and good Morosina”; he has finished the first strophe and sketched out
the second, and he sends these still formless attempts to his intimates,
to show them all that his feeble faltering hand can accomplish.
To sum up, the great moral movement of platonism resulted in a wide
dissemination of sensibility, and a general softening—a softening of
virtue and vice, of women and men. This was no small thing; there is
certainly an advantage in cutting the claws of men but scantly idyllic,
and in doing nothing rather than in doing ill.
This softening was often only external, and not without an admixture
of hypocrisy. But why deplore it? For men to appear worse than they
are is no proof that they are better. Men showed signs of sensibility,
even though they knew little of love. Under a mask of amiability and
tenderness their egotism remained intact; they talked of contemplation,
of devotion, of the worship beauty required,—without conviction, it
may be; but then they might have employed their time worse, and they
unconsciously contributed to spread salutary ideas. One of those
ridiculous creatures who spent their lives in haunting their idols like a
shadow, perceived with horror that on entering a church his lady refused
alms to a beggar. He was so deeply shocked that one of his friends had
much ado to prove to him, while chafing him back to life, that the beggar
was ill-bred, importunate, impudent, and unworthy of assistance. Here at
any rate was a man of sensibility.
But an untoward thing happened. In cultivating sensibility to the
utmost, women enfeebled men instead of forming them. Anne of France
undoubtedly foresaw this danger when she so ardently commended vigorous
and matter-of-fact occupations, and uttered a warning against the abuses
of the religion of beauty. Many other ladies, unhappily, genuine artists
in refinement, took a complacent pleasure in the very perfection of
their conduct, with the result that always ensues in such cases: their
art became degraded, and in sinking into a matter of routine, came to
ruin. In true love there is, as it were, an outpouring of one’s nature, a
vivifying joy, a sort of intense feeling which strengthens; but in love
in the more vulgar sense there is a spurious and meretricious poetry
which enervates. An old French proverb ran: “When the woman rules the
man, he hasn’t much will of his own.” This the anti-feminists repeated,
with too much reason. “Ah yes!” cries Nifo, “’tis in good sooth a fine
dream of yours. What a magnificent moral state if all men loved one
another! No more war, no more crime!... But is that the result you have
obtained? You have distilled I know not what mawkishness. Where are the
energetic, young-witted, happy, high-minded men born of your affections?”
And what was the age of love which was to spring from this generation?
We cannot impute to platonism the creatures of watery blood and hang-dog
look who were to form the nucleus of the court of the Valois—these
Panurges, false from top to toe, who had early wasted their substance
physical and moral—these young tired-eyed voluptuaries whom Lotto paints
so well, too weak to pluck the petals of a rose, their hand on their
heart as though to point out the source of the mischief. But alas!
we cannot but ascribe to sheer gallantry the mob of carpet knights,
pale-faced, gilded cap-a-pie, gay ornaments of tourneys, sleek and
fawning, ready like Ariosto to sing imaginary exploits, “provided that
beauty, which every hour robs them of some fresh portion of intelligence,
leaves them enough for the fulfilment of their promise.” They are rigged
out as elaborately as the ladies, if not more elaborately (save that
instead of displaying the bosom they display the leg), with flying
plumes; in winter, smothered under furs; in summer all unbraced, not
being able to endure even a loose garment; loaded with diamonds, so that
you would take them for walking showcases of the king of Naples or the
duke of Berry. They are philosophical, in the sense that they soar high
above ideas of patriotism, and prove it by disguising themselves in
costumes of all nations, the Turks included. They are learned, that is to
say, they think it smart to stuff the French language with heteroclite
words, as though eager to tear from it its pith and heart, and make this
also a delusion and a snare, as universally acceptable as blonde wigs and
padded busts.
The great, wonderful reform effected by platonism in the higher ranks of
society was—that the men, copying the ancient sages and the orientals,
let their beards grow! Up till then, no man could pretend to style unless
he shaved, or even, for the sake of greater perfection, depilated his
chin; there had been one cry of horror when Cardinal Bessarion appeared
with his beard at the court of Louis XI. But now that Castiglione, the
Roman prelates, and the high platonist society sported the philosophic
beard, there was a sudden craze for going unshorn among the young snobs
of Louis XII.’s court,—the Bonnivets and others.
This reform, strange to say, excited between the higher and lower clergy
one of the most acrimonious disputes with which we are acquainted. Vicars
and curates belaboured the bishops with texts against the beard. The
prelates parried with abstruse disquisitions; they claimed that a good
beard did no offence to honour and probity; they sifted the sentiments of
the ancient Romans in regard to the beard and found them in sympathy with
their own; they made out that the apostles had never dreamt of shaving,
and proved to demonstration that a decree of a council of Carthage,
appealed to by the lower clergy, was an interpolation, and in any case
was of no authority, the infallibility of the Church not dating back
so far; and a decree of Alexander III., which they were also clamorous
about, applied only to the hair of the head.
For the other part, to say nothing of the beard of Julius II.,[347] one
only had to turn over the leaves of church history to find on every page
bearded saints, sometimes of high eminence; bearded hermits, strangers
alike to the care of the body, to Plato, and to women. The dispute
occasioned a terrible waste of eloquence, erudition, vivacity, irony
and earnestness. It was of the highest importance, and bore on the most
sacred interests of what some eminent personages called platonism.
And now it cannot fail to be asked by what strange and cruel logic a
century, cradled at its birth in the idea of the beautiful, of love and
happiness, was to become a hotbed of hatred, the arena in which the most
savage animosities were implacably to contend. Must we believe that in
throwing down the barriers of a rigorous code and invoking liberty we
must inevitably bruise ourselves against force, rendered thereby freer
and more ferocious? That would be a sad and disheartening conclusion,
for then we should have to consider human progress as a perpetual
recommencement, seeing that, though the lawless rise insurgent against
tender hearts, though gospel wisdom warns us of the eternal despotism
of the violent, there are still found and will ever be found among us
incorrigible wretches, hungering for sympathy, and unable to live without
a ray of love.
CHAPTER III
INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE
Women approached intellectual questions in the same dilettante spirit
as questions of affairs; and this dilettantism was their chosen method.
It was waste of time to speak to them of discoveries, creations,
speculations, ventures, struggles—of the scientific furniture of life, of
all the irksome material tasks on which the intellectual existence itself
is based. They sought only to crown the edifice with happiness, which
does not concern those who clear the ground.[348] La Bruyère fancied he
was saying a very cutting thing when he declared that “women are cured
of idleness by means of vanity and love”; it is really very amiable;
would to heaven the same might be said of certain men! Women are cured
of idleness by sentiment; they reason with their feelings. You must not
ask them to pry and delve into the stubborn heart of things; they look
at the bright surface, and penetrate what yields to the touch. And by
this simple method they perceive things that escape the microscope,
things that defy analysis, thanks to an intuitive impressionability
which enables them to see rather than to know, and which would be wholly
admirable if it were never misused. Further, they have a marvellous and
mysterious talent for expressing their enthusiasm; a phrase feelingly
quoted by a lady strikes our mind with a quite peculiar force when we
afterwards come upon it in the pages of a book. Again, they love the men
who love what they love. How strong and firm a bond is a common love!
And how delightful to make mind the handmaid of love, and perhaps even
to make love the handmaid of mind! To live happy, what does it matter
whether you have an exact knowledge of a peacock’s or a nightingale’s
anatomy? Similarly women do not want you to pull words to pieces and
set them in accurate alphabetical order, but to place them in a living
order, so as to draw from them their vital force. As they ascribe
everything to love, and believe the establishment of a balance in human
affairs absolutely necessary, so they think also that their duty in
intellectual matters is to foster men’s productivity, their beautiful
art is concerned with men. Hence they do not trouble to investigate very
profoundly the secret significance of surrounding nature; it is of little
moment to them whether an artist seeks to reproduce natural forms with
photographic fidelity—which is in any case impossible—but they insist on
a general resemblance, they require the artist to indicate how a tree or
a landscape reflects itself in man, and what impression it produces. In
a word, they charge themselves with the mission of elevating our views,
whether by developing by means of artistic sensibility the ideas that lie
in germ in material nature, or by constantly renewing our thoughts by
means of a liberal philosophy.
The Italian women who at the end of the 15th century devoted themselves
to this intellectual programme were legion; or rather, they all did so.
There was no maiden, however modest her station, who did not consider
herself in a measure responsible for the future, and who did not make
real preparation for becoming the intellectual queen of a salon, or
of some sort of home of her own, while her husband attended to his
external occupations. And when her parents were happy enough to detect
in their little daughter the mysterious spark of the beautiful, far
from mistrusting it, they welcomed it with rapture as a sacred gift of
Providence and left nothing undone to develop it. Signorina Trivulzi, a
spoilt child of fortune, was in all seriousness thus “consecrated” to the
Muses at the age of fourteen.
Impressionability is a gift of nature; but that does not imply that there
is no need to strengthen it by means of an earnest intellectual culture.
People were only too well convinced of the necessity of this precaution
when they saw women who were impressionable and nothing else spinning
round like weathercocks. The Italian ladies of the classic generation
had known how to take a firm stand and a steady hold on life, so that
they united to perfection the eminently becoming qualities of solid
intelligence and modesty with an ardent impulse towards beauty in its
philosophic, religious, or artistic form.
If examples were necessary, our only difficulty would be to choose among
women like Cassandra Fideli, Costanza Varano, Isotta Nugarola, and many
another worthy of honour. There is little risk in our indicating among
the queens of the period Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua.
Isabella, who was born in 1474, and died in 1525, belongs in time to
the earlier generation, of whose characteristics she was thoroughly
representative; that is to say, along with a transparent soul, a heart
full of passion, and a quick intelligence, she retained virtues which
were to become rare—individuality of mind and sureness of taste. She was
not one of those impressionable women who are inevitably caught by the
glamour of established reputations, and who urge men on to achieve a
noisy notoriety; she could form her own estimate of things, and become
the originator rather than the follower of a movement. She travelled
frequently and to good purpose; her friends and agents, scattered as
far as the East, kept her informed of every event which might have any
bearing on the cult of beauty, such as the bringing-out of notable books
or fine editions, the works issued from great studios, excavations,
sales of collections. At the sale of the celebrated Vianelo collection
at Venice in 1505, she followed with the liveliest emotion the bidding
for a certain _Passage of the Red Sea_ by Jean de Bruges, which she
passionately coveted, and which Andrea Loredano remorselessly ran up
to a hundred and fifteen ducats. An antique Venus which much occupied
her thoughts happened unluckily to be in too good hands—those of Caesar
Borgia; but Caesar was not immortal, and one day the Venus rejoiced the
heart of a new owner, the duke of Urbino. Before long Cardinal d’Este
had willy-nilly to gird up his loins in pursuit of it. (What a lucky
windfall the sack of Rome in 1527 was to collectors!) The marchioness,
at the moment, emptied her purse, indeed, rather more than emptied
it,—always pretty easy to her; she had to charter a boat to carry off all
her treasures, but alas! the boat was seized by some rascally pirates,
and was never heard of again! For all these little vexations, those
were glorious days! One person’s calamity was another’s opportunity,
and as the result of the growth of culture, a stone newly unearthed, a
well-turned verse seemed diamonds of happiness.
Isabella was a royal, frank, delicate patroness of the human intellect.
She cherished in undisturbed harmony around her the _Sleeping Cupid_ of
Michelangelo and a choice collection of antique statues; she covered
her walls with the works of Mantegna, Costa, and Correggio; Leonardo da
Vinci and Titian were her portrait painters; she herself painted her soul
in two words: “Neither by hope nor by fear.” As an ideal for life and
an emblem for her house, she commissioned of the great idealist master
Perugino a _Combat between Love and Chastity_,[349] and wished to arrange
its composition to the minutest details; but poor Perugino, whose soul
was as simple and unspoiled as his head was thick, got a little befogged
in so intricate a scheme, so utterly unlike his usual Madonnas; and
for all his good will, perhaps he did not on that occasion produce his
masterpiece.
In France, the notable women of the generation of Isabella d’Este did
not plume themselves on playing a similar part; they rather avoided
it, whether because as partisans of physical activity they feared to
carry too much dilettantism into life, or because circumstances did
not strike them as favourable. Queen Anne of Brittany, in spite of her
surname of “refuge of learned men,” never regarded art as anything but
a royal and magnificent superfluity. Anne of France made her court a
veritable nursery-garden of literary men and artists; many works of
real magnificence were added to the library at Moulins; but Moulins did
not radiate an influence like Mantua. It was only the next generation
that saw the appearance of women of the Italian type, those queens
of the intellect of whom Mary Stuart was to leave us the enchanting
memory—Mary, to whom Ronsard could say without undue exaggeration—
Le jour que vostre voile aux vagues se courba,
Et de nos yeux pleurans les vostres deroba,
Ce jour, la mesme voile emporta loin de France
Les Muses qui souloient y faire demourance.
Depuis, nostre Parnasse est devenu stérile;
Sa source maintenant d’une bourbe distile ...
Son laurier est séché, son lierre est destruit![350]
Then the taste for pure art and the influence of the South towards
preciosity came in with a flourish of trumpets. The first French
Renaissance, in close contact with rural traditions, had devoted itself
mainly to the development of force of intellect. It had attached only a
secondary value to the worship of form and to external beauty; persons
who composed verses, like Charles of Orleans, did not proclaim the fact.
Classical relations were established with ancient Rome, the city which
drove its iron into the soul and left indestructible landmarks on the
soil of France. A ready assent would have been given to the saying of
Seneca: “There is only one art that is truly liberal and makes a man
free, and that is the study of wisdom; all other arts are base and
puerile.... I cannot give the name of liberal arts to painting, statuary,
and the decorative arts.”
This prejudice was persistent, with the result that, even while yielding
unreservedly to the religion of beauty, people could not bring themselves
to grant the plastic arts the same pre-eminence as in Italy. Moreover,
even in Italy, painting had had much difficulty in securing a footing:
many people at any rate gave sculpture the preference, that being plastic
indeed, but less decorative, more scientific, durable, and complete. The
comparison served as a theme for _jeux d’esprit_. Some people amused
themselves with defending the superiority of painting, by calling God
the first of painters, the sublime decorator; others carried the paradox
to the point of demonstrating that painting is necessary to war, if only
for drawing up plans or making sketches; that it evoked the enthusiasm
of the greatest conquerors, like Alexander the Great, and Demetrius,
who relinquished the siege of Rhodes rather than risk setting fire to a
district of the city where a picture by Protogenes might have perished
in the flames. In reality the Italians were fond of painting because
they found in it one of the most tender and delightful forms of poetry.
Castiglione well expressed this feeling to the sculptor Cristoforo
Romano: “It is not my friendship for Raphael that leads me to prefer
painting: I know Michelangelo, I know you, I know all these masters!
But I find in painting a marvellous charm; it has its plays of light,
its chiaroscuro; it demands as much skill in design as sculpture, and
offers special difficulties in regard to foreshortenings and perspective.
It gives us the colours of reality; it renders more satisfactorily the
flesh, the eyes, the sheen of armour, the delicious golden hues of hair,
the radiance of love. It alone can speak to us of Nature, reproduce for
us the starry skies, the hurricanes and tempests, the rosy dawn, the
earth and sea, hills and woods, meadows and gardens, rivers, cities and
houses.”
Among the French, on the contrary, the triumph of aestheticism led to
the lowering of the plastic arts in general esteem; painters, sculptors
and architects no longer received the same personal and affectionate
support from high-born ladies as formerly from Anne of France or Anne of
Brittany; they lost caste at the court of Francis I., and gained nothing
but higher wages; they were treated rather like house-decorators or
upholsterers. People applied to art the general principle: Seek ye first
intellectual beauty. All were agreed that thought must be worshipped in
its highest possible purity; and as thought nevertheless needs a material
vesture, poetry was its fitting garb, as “daughter of the skies”; and
consequently the movement followed a bent almost exclusively literary
and philosophico-poetical. It is hardly necessary for us to say that we
are here confining ourselves to the sphere of feminine illusions. No one
disputes the beneficial effect of mountain air on certain complaints;
but it would be exceedingly tiresome if all mankind were condemned to
live on the summit of the Righi.
Margaret of France set herself in opposition to these Alpine ladies, who
took such delight in the ever-receding altitudes of the intellect. She
was driven to adopt this attitude of temerity partly by her position. As
sister of the king, she had to fill the part of “queen of the sex,” and
so far as higher matters were concerned, it appeared natural and right
that her brother should follow her advice.[351] This explains why the
poets so decorously did homage to her: “heroine of the age,” they called
her, “mind and knowledge in person ... flower of flowers, the choicest of
the choice ... less human than divine.”
Apart from the inconveniences of too lofty a station, Margaret suffered
from those arising from her training, having like many women the
misfortune of being particularly sensible to influences; her flights are
often those of someone else. She remained unswervingly faithful to the
habits of her childhood, in other words, to a brilliant and sceptical
environment, in which ready wit was regarded as the supreme gift, and
liberty consisted in seeing everything, reading everything, hearing
everything from a detached eminence, superficially, and without caring
for anything in particular except the satisfaction of a sense of form.
The only dogma tenaciously held was the pre-eminence of women, and it was
an accepted maxim in that society that one woman of real accomplishment
conduces more effectually to human happiness than all the lumber of
sciences and all the litter of books.
Margaret was thus a philosopher, generous and variable, sceptical and
enthusiastic, somewhat visionary, because the speculative spirit spells
freedom and distinction. But she was lacking in that ballast of serious
studies[352] which, after all, alone permits the development of one’s
personality.
Thus lost in the clouds, unstable and vacillating, in reality she took
no one intellectual party under her wing; she smiled on everything that
was beautiful or pleasant, in other words, on every means of acting on
men. She was fond of the music of that period, a wholly psychological
art with very little to tickle the ears of the groundlings, but speaking
to the soul; she loved any product of the intellect provided the setting
was worthy of the gem—ribald stories if they were witty, the drama,
lofty speculations on the emotional life, thoughts of divine love, the
religious contemplation of God. All these manifestations of the soul,
so little alike, she regarded as forming a single philosophic chain, a
chain of beauty leading up to God. This idea enabled her to link together
conceptions which appear to us disconcerting in juxtaposition, and which
her contemporaries themselves were at a loss to reconcile.
Her patronage was above all an art, the art of playing upon the human
intelligence as on the finest of keyboards, as on a magnificent and
genuinely divine instrument, and of drawing from it the grand harmonies
of which it is capable, the tones with which the Supreme Artist has
endowed it. Here she strikes a grave and profound note, there a note
shrill or thin; she sets men vibrating. “What!” she seems to say, “they
say that love deadens! No, no! People of feeling may find their joy in
their own natures, but that does not hinder them from finding it outside
themselves.” Bouchet and Rabelais, two men of the traditional school,
were dependents of Margaret, as well as Charbonnier and Marot, the poets
of the day, or Du Bellay and Ronsard, the poets of the morrow. Surrounded
by Catholic prelates, herself the intellectual lieutenant of a king
hostile to the Reformers, the princess interested herself in everything:
Lefèvre d’Etaples and Vatable discussed the Bible with her, Nicolas
Mauroy translated the Psalms for her; Jean Brèche translated Plutarch,
and Le Masson, Boccaccio. Her own intellect volatilised itself, and was
content to perfume the atmosphere.
It was the same in regard to persons; she admitted to intimate fellowship
with her the most diverse personages provided they were able to love;
and freedom of sentiment was apparently the essential condition of life.
Moreover, the intellectual life had not yet assumed the rectangular and
rigid forms under which we know it; and as people were particularly
eager for impressions, they were on their guard against all the checks
by which we so cleverly destroy them. A ruined wall was a ruin, moss
and neglect were part of its being; no one dreamt of scraping it,
ticketing it, surrounding it with an iron fence and a ring of pebbles.
An ancient monument showed itself as it was, covered with all the
vegetation which gave, so to say, artistic expression to the life of
succeeding generations; no one dreamt of rebuilding it as it originally
stood; objects of art _were_ objects of art, which people left in the
places they were made for, well in view and fittingly displayed, instead
of carting them away and piling them up in gold frames and lifeless
desolation on the walls of a museum.
To understand the intellectual dilettantism of Margaret we must steep
ourselves in these ideas of liberty and life, which are so alien to our
modes of thought, and which even then were on the point of disappearing.
Margaret loved to make an emotional impression on others, but she was
not at all anxious to guide their reason, any more than she was anxious
to be guided herself. Her zest for liberty, pushed to its extreme limit,
went almost as far as anarchy. What a singular intellectual harem was
hers! Here was a gay dog whose humour had a touch of obscenity; there
was a dear friend, the protonotary D’Anthe, author of witty trifles
particularly wanton, for instance the _Blason d’une jeune fille_, which
we could hardly venture to reproduce; or again, in an entirely different
direction, the oppressively virtuous Lavardin, a mighty fang-extractor,
whose special duty was to expurgate improper books; or the squeamish La
Perrière, who was a century behind the times, apologised for employing
the names of mythology, and had the worst of all defects, that of being
a bore. These various minds, working symmetrically, produce somewhat the
same effect as those many-paned mirrors set revolving by an invisible
hand, which might flash for ever without luring an eagle, but are very
serviceable for catching larks. The defect of this society was that
it attracted second-rate personages, pushing men, notoriety hunters.
Moreover, platonist society had always a strong tendency to degenerate
into snobbery; it had too much worldliness of character not to suit
drawing-room intriguers and men who knew how to get on in the world.
Platonism knew nothing of the modest and intelligent men who kept in the
background to enjoy the human comedy. This defect amused Castiglione: “To
be learned,” he said, “you must belong to the learned set.” The result
was sometimes amusing blunders; through being attributed to the wrong
author a poem or a piece of music would be received with hearty applause,
but afterwards, when better informed, the applauders would hiss, or vice
versa. It is the same with everything: wine is good or bad according to
the label; Castiglione guarantees he will present you any fool and get
you to believe him a genius.[353]
Margaret of France had a taste for notoriety, and sought to bring
together all the men who could voice the various opinions of France. She
showed them so much affectionate attention that each believed himself
to be the favourite, and every cause looked on her as an adherent; to
this day, after three centuries and a half, the witchery of the princess
remains so potent that everyone loves her and lays claim to her; the
platonic think she was a platonist, Rabelaisians rank her as one of
themselves, Protestants call her a Protestant. She contented herself with
disseminating love, with reconciling and discreetly moderating bitter
differences without ever bemoaning those which had brought suffering to
herself. It is a singular thing that at a distance she is sometimes taken
for a domineering, masculine blue-stocking, one of those women who shake
men as the wind shakes the trees, stripping them of leaf and blossom;
whereas near at hand she was all softness and loving-heartedness. The
most ardent declarations brought no frown to her brow (and left her heart
untouched); she pardoned them, laughed at them, sometimes received
them with a smile of pleasure. Thus a nobody named Jacques Pelletier
permits himself to call her “the half of my soul,” and boasts of her
“bitter-sweet favours,” by which he means tender and coy. But Margaret
for all her bashfulness does not care for bashful men; she prefers
energetic and robustious men who set the pulses beating, who even make
themselves tiresome and are not incapable of follies. A certain M. de
Lavaux swears he will die if she does not take pity on his martyrdom;
she promises him an admirable _De Profundis_. The amiable Hugues Salel
praised her pretty hand in extremely graceful little verses;[354] she
sends him a pair of scented gloves and a bracelet. But she never forgets
Marot; beyond the tomb, when all follies are over, she still proves her
sympathy for him.
Apart from this spirit of love you will probe the depths of her soul in
vain; there is nothing else to be found.
Margaret has photographed herself in her dressing-gown, surrounded by
her intimate friends, in the _Heptameron_;[355] the authenticity of the
portrait is guaranteed by herself and her daughter. And what strikes
one most forcibly in her doctrine is a pretty style and an excellent
solicitude to avoid dulness.
Her gospel was, in heaven God, on earth Francis I.; after them the
Beautiful, in which she believed with all her heart as the source of all
goodness and all truth. So far as happiness was concerned, she boldly
steered for love, which she regarded as the port for the Good and the
True. But she had little faith in passion, and confined herself to
drawing a most careful distinction between sentiment, which she praised,
and sensation, which she condemned; her system was built up on casuistry.
She thought that a woman might frankly accept the offer of a virtuous and
perfect love; if the man secretly harboured any carnal design, so much
the worse for him! Having never loved deeply herself, while on the other
hand she had heard so much talk of love, she believed that love was not
fatal and that a woman was by no means bound to push charity to the point
of absolute self-sacrifice. But remember, she did not commingle the ideas
of love and marriage, which were absolutely distinct. As no one can love
God without first loving one of His creatures, her design was to lure
men thus towards the perfect love of God, and then towards a mystic and
philosophical contemplation of the Godhead.
Unluckily, she did not reach her goal, or even get within sight of it.
Not for want of ardour: it may well be said of her: “Woman is a flame
flaming for ever.” For Bonnivet, “even in their ashes” lived her “wonted
fires,” lighting up in him the happy memories of youth. She spoke with
fervour, overwhelmed the sceptics with biting taunts or lofty deductions,
stimulated the timid by a cheering word, a flight of sentiment. But she
wore herself out in this perpetual skirmishing; what she lacked was the
will and the intellectual power to effect a sharp, decisive stroke.
As for those on whose conversion to the system of beauty and love she
uselessly spent her strength, she got little satisfaction from them.
Attached to her car she dragged along two lovers, who ought to have been
the apostles of her philosophy. In reality these very men resisted her.
One of them, the steward Jean de Montausé,[356] an excellent type of
official, gallant, frank of speech, amiable in manner, and infinitely
courteous, never succeeded in realising the transcendent and virtuous
object she had in view. Learning, he finds, is turned to bad uses:
religion he respects on principle, without studying it deeply, and
laughing in his sleeve at certain mysteries; but virtue he recognises in
Madame de Montausé (he is married), not elsewhere. How Margaret exclaims
at him may be imagined! Louise of Savoy takes Montausé under her wing.
The other lover, Nicolas Dangu, bishop of Seez, possesses all the
princess’s affection. He follows her to watering-places, sentiment oozing
at every pore. He has good sense, modesty, and so eminently conciliatory
a spirit that he does not deny intelligence to monks and the common
people; he even has a profound admiration for the genius of certain
malefactors. What a delightful creature is the genuine platonic prelate,
so polished, so amenable! How tender, how honeyed, how bland! But he too
opposes an almost insurmountable obstacle to her philosophy in practice;
he dares not love her love, think her thoughts; he _does_ think, but it
is of dying of love, and he has a thousand ways of doing that. He is
always dying; he would die rather than say a foolish thing or betray a
secret; he dares not put woman’s love to the test, for fear of finding it
wanting; if it proved real, he would die of joy. He gets angry with Henri
d’Albret, but personally seems quite content with what he has _not_ got;
he is the perfection of wisdom and prudence! Yet he gently insinuates
that too coy a virtue may become cruel. Margaret is a little troubled;
she replies that before she can trust men she requires good sureties,
and meanwhile she forgives Dangu’s rash speech because he speaks well
of women. That is all she has been able to get out of him, the perfect
platonist! But that also is all she gives him.
This social governance, then, does not go to the heart of the question at
issue, and does not even convert those who from the first were apostles
of the dawn, still less the indifferent, the soi-disant serious men of
the world who are met with almost everywhere. The _Heptameron_ presents
us with several types, eminently true to life, who clearly show that
conversation is not to be relied on to propagate the philosophy: a trim
little widow, Madame de Longray, infatuated about her dead husband and
very bewitching to other women’s husbands, a veritable scatter-brain
in all purity and honour; Mademoiselle Françoise de Clermont,[357] a
plump little soul, a bit of a goose, who loves naughty anecdotes, but
is extremely shocked at the naturalistic theories of Henri d’Albret and
Louise of Savoy; the hoary Burye, who has lost all his illusions with his
teeth, convinced by experience of the necessity of platonism, without
feeling the want of a brand-new deity expressly manufactured for him;
Mademoiselle de Clermont calls him “Old Father Virtue.” Then there is the
mother of the famous Brantôme, Anne of Vivonne,[358] the _fin de siècle_
woman, a friend of canons, but a foe to monks; virtuous in principle, but
so kind, so very kind! She cannot understand how a woman can live without
being loved; she can refuse nothing to anybody; she has a warm affection
for St. Magdalene.
“Saffredent,” a well-preserved white-headed beau, cannot make head or
tail of all the new theories, and does not mean to. They humiliate
him. Do people take him for a mummy, a valetudinarian, a blown-out
salamander—for one of those golden-tongued Italians who are all
tongue and nothing else? For a dull student with no wants beyond his
water-bottle and his cook? He is a knight, esteems only valour and
daring and integrity. His speech is like a clarion-call; true virtue, he
maintains, consists in loving according to the law of nature,—in loving
one woman with all one’s heart rather than in idolising thirty-six on
paper. Use is better than abuse. At this unkind and clinching phrase
there is a general outcry, and Madame de Longray sighs.
Philosophy limits itself to these extremely superficial passages at arms.
Margaret takes pleasure in them; she resembles a blue, transparent sea,
chafed and rippled by the sportive breezes, every moment glistening and
changing form; but the wind is not set nor the sunlight steady.
She has left us a large number of writings, in which we might at least
hope to find or to seek for a more definite groundwork of ideas.
M. Le Franc has devoted himself to the difficult task of examining
them all, and in these, again, he has found something of
everything—philosophical mysticism, solemn farces, pious impieties,
moralities half moral, aristocratico-democratic diversions. The only note
common to all is a profound sense of the emptiness of things—which has
nothing in common with happiness! Sometimes through the most magnificent
fantasies one catches sight of a big rolling tear. Margaret tells us that
she knew three lives: a life of love, an intellectual life, and a life of
contemplation. But she is lost, as it were, in the desert of her thought,
and when her god on earth, the big, jovial, sensual Francis I., dies, she
breaks down altogether, and falls back almost desperately upon religion
with its terrors.
Life is an instrument of vulgar joy, which exalts only those who humble
themselves; Margaret’s mistake was in wishing to remain always on the
heights.
Her maxim was to distinguish flesh from spirit, “darkness from light,”
and to love love for love’s sake: “Thy love loves thee.” But, apart from
the fact that these ideas were not absolutely her own, and that the
second already denotes a declension from platonism, we are disturbed on
perceiving here and there a strange finger-mark. Margaret had for her
private secretary and collaborator a sort of scoundrel, a demon of wit,
but one who believed in nothing, not even in his “Minerva.” On reading
the _Mirror of the Soul_, her first work, and one which betrays the
prentice hand, Bonaventure des Périers at once perceived that there was
a place to be filled about the author; he plied her with entreaties, and
with puns, and thus became a lieutenant of platonism. The princess showed
him infinite kindnesses; in his _Cymbalum_, in which he flouted the only
principles on which men were still at one—the existence of God and a few
truths of elementary morality—Des Périers was mean enough to hold her up
to ridicule; he represented her as seeking to imbue poets with a “chaste
and divine” spirit, and sending to Pluto (with a _u_) to ask at once for
news of the painter Zeuxis and for patterns of tapestry.[359] Margaret
forgave everything; she granted the villain a “prison” in her house,
and tried again to improve him by setting him to translate the Dialogues
of Plato. But Des Périers, not finding in them the secret of happiness,
escaped for good and all by suicide in 1544, and Margaret once more
showed her pity by patronising a posthumous edition of his works. That
was the man who had doubtless a most intimate part in the composition
of writings which he heartily despised, and which he called a “Pactolus
of verse and prayer.” He boasted of being their “miscreator,” and in
offering one of them to the author he said, with matchless impudence,
“Here is your immortal book, and you will find my faults there.”
Thus, if you come near Margaret of France, who appears to govern
everything, you find nothing but a mere dilettantism, a manifestation of
intellectual epicurism, which influences either ideas or the expression
of them. She fixed her eyes not on truth, but on happiness.
As a guiding force Diana of Poitiers showed more precision and vigour.
Having innumerable reasons for leaning less towards the Medici, with
more physical beauty than Margaret, more highly endowed in respect of
will, she did not devote herself exclusively to the cultivation of the
intellect; she loved all the arts, the plastic included, in the good old
way. She had a pretty skill in poetry, and appreciated books, especially
beautiful manuscripts and fine bindings. She had in her library the
Bible, the church Fathers, and books on mystic theology, alongside of
her favourite romances, particularly the _Amadis_, which she recommended
to the King; to these, as an eminently practical woman, she added books
on medicine and natural history; no philosophy to speak of; a copy of
Politian, a few treatises on history and geography, a Plutarch, a fair
amount of poetry. For her, Philibert Delorme built Anet, Jean Goujon
wrought sculptures for it, Jean Cousin, Leonard Limosin, and Bernard
Palissy decorated it. She was in fact a French counterpart of Isabella
d’Este, a marvellous type of the “lady art patron.” Without aiming at
the quintessences of pure love, she really and practically laboured to
elevate the cult of beauty.
Women who feel within themselves the power to bear on the sacred torch
and to draw minds directly towards the idea of the beautiful certainly
ought not to hesitate. But after all, to appreciate art in its practical
results, to criticise it, to support it by one’s approbation, is a
very noble end, and one suited to any woman, however retiring. History
and experience show that these practical influences are often the most
effective. This secret society, that religious association accomplish
more by simply living their creed day by day than by all your dogmatic
teaching. What extraordinary power might not women wield if they were all
animated by one spirit urging them towards a common end! And what a noble
end—to sustain in the world the healthful principles of beauty, to fill
the life of men really and truly with things they can love! To assign to
art this social mission, to carry out in regard to it this magnificent
part of “patron,” would be to vivify it! Vivify! Let us say rather save
it from itself and its abuses! Art would speedily come to ruin if the
whims, fads, and prejudices which creep into the studios were not held
in check by the necessity of reckoning with the individual and original
judgment of experts.
Alas! this is an evil of our present-day society,—this awful slough of
commonplace in which we are floundering—a cause or an effect of our
moral degeneration and our utter depravity of taste. Big houses built to
a specification, decorated at so much a yard, invisibly heated on some
patent system you never heard the name of, peopled by lackeys whom you
don’t know and only see when they open the doors! Dolly women, clothed by
their tailors, a pattern or a copy of their neighbours, with the habits
of their callers, the ideas of the men they know, and the conversation of
their grooms,—with nothing of their very own; not women at all! People
in olden days were so thoroughly persuaded of the real social necessity
of forming “amateurs” that the old Italian educators of the fifteenth
century wished men to be brought up with that end. How much more women,
who have leisure and an inborn refinement! It is very easy to demand that
an object, however simple and unpretentious one may suppose it, should
bear a stamp of originality and good taste. Is it not at least possible
to insist on simplicity in all things, to banish tinsel and brummagem
and all our horrible pretentious magnificence?—to seek breadth instead
of narrowness?—to give ourselves the pure free air of the Beautiful?—and
further, to put writers and artists in a position to express wholesome
things with sincerity, in other words, to see things healthily? It
would be foolish, deplorable, fatal to ask them to express what they do
not feel; but they must be made to feel what they are to paint. There
is here an important task to accomplish, and, to a certain extent, an
easy one. Everyone knows how sensitive mental toil, particularly if
excessive, makes the man who devotes himself to it. Taine goes so far as
to consider us the direct products of the influences that encompass us!
It is certain that we borrow much from our environment, that the dulness
or cheerfulness of the sky, for instance, tinges our thoughts with very
different colours; how much more does the sadness or joy of those whom
we love? We must create then for art a good moral atmosphere. And when
Castiglione writes: “God is only seen through women,” he is not wrong in
crying up this spy-glass of his, he understands the need of which we have
just spoken; it is as if, on entering a cathedral, he were inviting us to
look into the _bénitier_, as if he were showing us a picture in a mirror.
There are women’s souls, clear, thrilling, passionate, which reflect
things with a distinctness and a vividness of colour that would otherwise
be unsuspected. And without launching out into speculations as lofty as
those of Margaret of France, mere “women amateurs” can play an artistic
part of the first order.
As a rule, Egerias have less need of a transcendent intellect than of an
ample provision of good sense, tact, and above all patience, for they may
look forward to struggling against terrible temptations.
The intellectual and artistic tribe of the Renaissance was no better
than any other. It teemed with crotchety species; it included the usual
specimens—the pedant, the man with a grievance, the ingenuous prig, the
strutting peacock, the matter-of-fact aesthete always on the look-out
for a place or a pension. The proud were always the best, and the least
troublesome. Play their cards never so carefully, women found this
society difficult to rule; in general, to govern well you have only to
make your subordinates discontented, but here you can only reign on
condition of satisfying them.
The first step in the intellectual tutelage consisted sometimes in doing
little material services, in a quite friendly and natural way (for you
can’t live on love). To give “a few crumbs from her table,” to aid the
friends of her friends, to look after orphans,—nothing was simpler or
less remarkable in a lady: many men would have done as much. Bembo,
badly treated by a farmer who owed him two hundred and thirty ducats in
“broad gold,” did not hesitate a moment to tear Vittoria Colonna from her
celestial preoccupations, to beg her to deal with this little matter.
To venture on this ground, however, demanded no little caution. Aretino
has shown how easy it was to make a simple expression of friendliness an
opportunity for self-advertisement and extortion. What a perfect master
he was! Titian applied to him for assistance in disposing of a certain
_Annunciation_ which was hanging fire. This was how Aretino proceeded.
He issued a flaming advertisement, which fairly hooked the Empress
Isabella of Portugal, who raked up from her husband’s cash-box the sum
demanded, two thousand crowns. Aretino instantly unmasked and offered to
her “sacred and renowned Majesty his inkpot and pens”; in plain English,
asked for a pension. What a fine tooth-puller he would have made!
This Aretino fluttered about Vittoria Colonna, whom he sought to capture
through her vanity. “Read my books,” he writes to her; “read the
_Courtesan_: you will see if your praises were not always at the point of
my pen.”
Everybody knows how deeply impressed Aretino always was by the honours
of the marchioness, and when his style is defective, there is abundance
of will to make up for it. “I have always known you to be of a generous
spirit, a magnanimous nature, an active mind, an absolute virtue, a noble
faith, a good life. If it were not so, I would have told you.”
That was the beginning of the oddest of correspondences. The lady naïvely
thought that she could content the monster with fair words; but he
undeceived her by the present of a highly seasoned book, with an explicit
request for commendation and money. So far as commendation was concerned,
Vittoria thought the request very natural; but the excuse for asking
money she thought rather thin. However, she promised sixty crowns, and
even fancied she was only acting the great lady in at once sending him
thirty, accompanied by some gentle advice. Aretino, in his turn deeply
wounded, did not quarrel with “the most excellent lady”; he confined
himself to dotting the i’s. “I have to consider the tastes of our
contemporaries,” he said; “amusement and scandal are the only things that
pay; people burn with concupiscence, as you burn with an inextinguishable
angelic flame; for you sermons and evensong, for them music and the
play!” Why write serious books? He had sent one to Francis I. five years
before, and was still awaiting acknowledgment; he had just addressed his
_Courtesan_ to the king, and by return of post received a gold chain:
“after all, I write for my bread.”
Vittoria’s purse remained shut. Our fine gentleman would have liked to
return the thirty crowns; unluckily he had spent some of them, and he
sent back only some epigrams. The marchioness suggested that he should
give the balance to the poor, hinting that no worldly pelf was worth as
much as the love of God. In consideration of a recommendation to the
duchess of Urbino, Aretino condescended to keep what was not already
spent. “I too,” he writes with his habitual impertinence,—“I too am a
virtuous and Christian beggar, and deserving of your alms; I do not think
the poor of Ferrara, of whom you speak, so poor that you cannot assist
one of the poor here, since for you it suffices to be rich in spirit
through the grace of Christ.”
This little dialogue will show whether women needed an angelic soul to
influence for good rarely-gifted men on whom pure love had no hold. But
lofty motives must have sustained them; there was really some truth in
Aretino’s plea; yes, fortune and glory are only reached by devious paths.
Little sketches and dialogues in the taste of the day paid Aretino very
well, without great labour on his part; a bookseller in the Rue St.
Jacques at Paris made his fortune merely by retailing them, and in the
simplest way. He would sell to a lady a book more or less licentious, and
as such books are never lent, by and by another lady was sure to pay him
a visit. “Madam, here’s one that’s much worse,” whispers the good man in
his half Italian jargon, slipping into her hand another very expensive
book. It was just the same in the artists’ studios; Ledas and Venuses
went off like hot cakes, but Titian’s _Annunciation_ gathered dust on the
easel, and Carpaccio had infinite difficulty in selling at so much a foot
a religious picture which he considered one of his best.
In France, the position was for a long time not quite so bad, in the
sense that the men of letters, excellent fellows who mixed little
with the world, esteemed themselves infinitely lucky to receive after
solicitation an ecclesiastical benefice which made them independent.
One historian becomes incoherent in pouring out his gratitude because a
good book, the fruit of many years’ toil and travel, has secured him a
life-annuity. But this patriarchal simplicity also disappeared in the
end. Publishers had to cater for the public, and one curious affair shows
us how they taught authors their trade.
Vérard, the famous publisher whose magnificent productions are still
a joy to connoisseurs, had agreed to publish in 1500 a book by Jean
Bouchet, entitled _The Foxes traversing the Perilous Ways_. The author
was already received at court, the book had an excellent title, piquant
and suggestive. Nevertheless, Vérard began by erasing the name of
Bouchet, and substituting that of Brandt, a German as well known to the
French as the Scandinavians are to-day, and whom, moreover, Bouchet had
sought to imitate.
The young poet durst not complain; however, when he read the volume
in print, he noticed that Vérard had unceremoniously cut out entire
passages, replacing them with passages pillaged from right and left.
Bouchet seized the occasion and commenced an action: whereupon Vérard,
utterly surprised at so much virtuous indignation, came to terms like a
lord; he paid over a good round sum, and asked for no receipt.
Still, this sort of thing was rudimentary, and, apart from the question
of private morals, harmless. What was much less inoffensive was the
passion of the authors themselves, once they had learnt their cue, for
the novel, obscene, or sensational effects which alone secured the
attention of the public. They speedily got level with the Italians.
Ulrich von Hütten gave an admirable send-off to his _Epistles of Obscure
Men_ by surreptitiously putting manuscript copies in circulation.
Bonaventure des Périers almost attained to Aretino’s skill. The alleged
official destruction of his _Cymbalum_ justified a clandestine second
edition, which of course was priceless. “Let us write some vile thing,”
he says in one of his dialogues, “and we shall find a bookseller who’ll
give us ten thousand crowns for the copy.” That is true; the public only
buys and circulates and really cries up the books it contemns. Many
notorious books of that time, which we take seriously to-day, probably
had no other origin.
An author, indeed, has a perfect right to desire to live at the expense
of his readers. But, after all, he must beware, in matters of art,
of commercial inducements, and the more indifference, weakness, and
unconcern the good public displays, the more one ought to thank the
distinguished women who undertake to oppose the high bids of naturalism
or extravagance. They do not always succeed; they are sometimes the
dupes of noise and fashion; let us forgive them for what they have given
us, for the sake of what they have spared us. In these days, people are
ready enough to abuse the old system of patronage, which they charge with
subverting the dignity of man; to seek something from the State, from a
member of the Government, seems natural enough, but many writers would
think themselves humiliated by submission to any social patronage—which,
however, society is not eager to offer. In the 16th century, among
intellectual circles, men were republicans even in a monarchy: they
were not enamoured of the idea of the State. And private patronage,
in spite of its imperfections, often served as a home for meditation,
a shelter for independent men who preferred high thinking to popular
applause; if it proved deadening, it was only on mediocre minds. When we
see what circumlocution, and what subtle diplomacy the most influential
princesses had to employ to gain admission to Raphael’s or Giovanni
Bellini’s studio, we have no further misgiving as to the disadvantages
of patronage. For a lady to send a poet in distress “a little sugared
solace” as Des Périers said, and with so much discretion that the source
of the gift remains unknown, or to express her sympathy in the form of
a costly present—in this we see nothing to impair the dignity of man;
indeed, to be frank, it appears to us delightful.
Moreover, patronage did not confine itself to a purely material and
administrative support, as the State necessarily does. Besides sending
a present in season, the ladies were still more ready to distribute the
small but not less precious coin of tendernesses and compliments. We are
here returning into their proper domain, and an intellectual man capable
of withstanding this influence would be a rarity. The lady author who
praises a writer smacks a little of her trade; Veronica Gambara, after
overwhelming Aretino with rhapsodies, cries naïvely, “Praised by you, I
shall live a thousand years!” It was “Kae me, I’ll kae thee.” But from a
genuine lady of rank, eminent and bountiful, who asks for nothing, one
charming phrase, even though it be qualified and far from flattering, is
glory, and a glory that can be solicited without humiliation. “They say
I am an aristocrat,” wrote Taine, and he was, as we all are who pretend
to lead men’s minds. That is why we need this sybaritism,—need to be
sustained and perchance guided by a smile. There is hardly a philosopher
or poet of the 16th century whose pages are not illuminated and gladdened
by the smile of some high-born lady.
How can we analyse this smile? We could not without seeing it, and
we only know it very indirectly. We divine it under an infinitely
caressing word; in a pretty diminutive, “my little sister,” “wifie”; in
an affectionate superlative; Vittoria Colonna calls her friend Dolce
“Dolcissimo,” and speaks to him, with a quite natural grace and without
apparent exaggeration, of his “divine sonnets,” for which she has not
words enough to thank him; with her friend Bembo she permits herself to
gush forth familiarly in artless enthusiasm. What a curious litany is
the correspondence addressed to that “very magnificent” rogue Aretino,
who highly valued the honour done him, and took all possible advantage
of it! The writers are the marchioness of Mantua, with her grace and
reserve; Mary of Aragon, “the sovereign marchioness of Avalos,” on
particularly good terms with him because she has not altogether given up
hope of turning him into a monk; the duchess of Urbino, warm, gushing,
who calls him “my magnificent most loving lover”; then the good ladies
who have lost their hearts to the man of the hour, who take him as he is,
a scoundrel but famous, and who write to him as the “fount of eloquence,
astonishing, admirable, miracle of nature, most virtuous, (yes, you are!)
most wise, my father, my brother.”[360]
The relations of a lady with her protégés were established by slow
degrees, or simply through her chancing to hear of a work that bespoke
her practical interest. The lady learns through her secret agents that
a book is about to appear, in prose perhaps, perhaps a history; she
wishes to have the first peep at it; the author, taken by surprise, makes
excuses with profound modesty, but sends his manuscript all the same; and
the ice is broken, the circuit is complete. The connection will continue
under various forms; the writer tells her in confidence of his various
works, then in his turn begins to beat the coverts for talents of hers
that are lying concealed. In return the lady announces his work _urbi
et orbi_, and takes his friends to her heart. A real intimacy is set up
between them, sometimes so entirely spiritual that they never even see
each other. Thus, before publishing his _Courtier_, Castiglione submitted
the manuscript to Vittoria Colonna under the seal of the profoundest
secrecy. Vittoria kept it rather a long time, and when at last she had
to return it, she excused herself very prettily, being still, as she
says, only half-way through the second part: she omits to add that
she had lent it rather indiscreetly. She has no suggestion to make,
except perhaps that he should not give the names of the ladies whose
beauty he is praising in a book intended for the public. Otherwise she
applauds everything with all her soul: the freshness of the subject, the
refinement, elegance and animation of the style. She is horribly jealous
of the persons whose words are quoted in such a book, even if they are
dead. As to the passages on the virtue and impeccable chastity of women,
she adores them and considers herself, as a woman, honoured by them; but
on this point she prefers not to say all that is in her mind.
With Michelangelo she exercises the same supervision; she begs him, in a
charming note, to send her a crucifix he is working at, and to come and
have a chat.[361]
Far from dissembling the patronage of which they were the objects,
the writers and artists boasted of it. In all sincerity they believed
women to have been created and sent into the world to inspire them
with intelligence. If they had their portraits painted seated in their
studies, it was not in the midst of a litter of books, weapons, or
carpets, nor even with an air of deep thought or abstraction; it was
simply as natural men, writing beside a little Cupid who serves them as
tutelary deity. It was accepted without question that a woman’s hand
must shake the bough to set the mind winging its flight. “My mind,
my strength, my Pallas, is Lydia,” exclaims Catti.[362] Antonio de
Gouvea[363] declares that he had no suspicion of what was in him till the
fair-haired Catherine of Bauffremont discovered him as one discovers a
treasure under the snow: “I should have thought the snow cold, but lo!
it was fire.” Michelangelo sings the same song in every key: “Through
your fair eyes I see a tender light which my blinded eyes could not have
seen.... Wingless, I fly with your wings; through your quick spirit I am
unceasingly uplifted towards heaven.... I have no other will than yours;
in your soul my thought has birth; my words are moulded in your mind.
I am like the moon, who never shines in the sky but as reflecting the
brilliance of the sun;” and he adds this profound saying: “O Lady, who by
fire and water refinest and purgest the soul for happy days, ah! grant me
to return never more to myself!” That was the simple method by which many
women in those days directed the minds of men.
We must not exaggerate: we do not pretend that you must everywhere
_chercher la femme_, that without her nothing is possible, that she has
confiscated the key to all human learning. On the contrary, she has done
little for the exact sciences; she has contented herself with piercing
the heavens or clambering in somehow or other. But the great kindred of
impressionable beings, every man who has lived by beauty and sought after
happiness, from philosopher to artist, from talker to poet, every man
capable of feeling an emotion, has owed much to women. “Emotion, which is
only an accident in the life of man, is it not woman’s whole existence?”
And in such a matter, can a better judge be found? Woman is freer from
prejudice than man: “she does not need to give abstract reasons for her
enthusiasms: her passion, her pity well up spontaneously while man is
still discussing and deliberating. And in so doing, she almost always
sees more truly.”[364]
Women are the eternal guardians of the Beautiful, and it cannot be said
that in this respect the Renaissance introduced any absolutely new idea.
Long before, noble châtelaines used frequently to shelter under their
roofs the churchman employed to illuminate their Books of Hours, and
princesses encouraged the ballad-monger and the image-vendor. Women have
always cultivated their souls! But it was a new thing to devote this
fervour and enthusiasm to a religion of beauty. In other directions,
the women have been condemned; but their aesthetic influence has seemed
legitimate; and, in a word, “the works they patronised, the châteaux
built for them, have endured, when the doughty deeds of knights on the
battlefield have hardly left a trace.”
CHAPTER IV
INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE (_Continued_)
The influence of women declared itself in certain well-marked results.
In the first place, it led to the germination of what may be called a
technical literature: that is, of works intended to prove the legitimacy
and necessity of feminine sway.
The classical type of this literature is Boccaccio’s book, _Of
Illustrious Women_. Boccaccio lived in a backward age, which is the
excuse for certain epigrams of his; but he remained none the less the
women’s favourite writer, because he had had the courage to ransack
antiquity, to quarrel with Virgil, to extol Dido, and to collect for
the first time a multitude of immortal examples—Cleopatra, Lucrece,
Semiramis, Sappho, Athaliah. Nothing, therefore, was safer than to
republish, amplify, and imitate his work in every shape and form, and the
opportunity was not lost, God knows!
In addition to this Boccaccian literature, which was already extensive,
we must note the appearance of a numerous family of semi-philosophical,
semi-historical writings, devoted to the glorification of the reigning
sex; winning causes never lack defenders. The names of Bruni, Portio,
Lando, Domenichi, and many others would certainly merit a page in the
annals of feminism; Benedetto da Cesena specially demonstrates the honour
and virtue of women, Capella their excellence, Luigini their beauty. The
feature common to the most of these works is that while claiming to be
very lofty, abstract and impersonal speculations, they are all the time
aimed more or less covertly at the heart of one woman in particular.
If Firenzuola discourses like Plato himself, it is because he has the
countess of Vernio as his ideal. Nifo compiled his treatise _On the
Court_ under the auspices of the prince and princess of Salerno, but
his ardour was more especially inspired by the charms of Phausina Rhea.
Ravisius Textor wrote his _Memorable and Illustrious Women_ because there
happened to be one Jeanne de Vignacourt, wife of President Gaillard.
We ourselves ought to have conformed to this fascinating custom and to
have inscribed a lady’s name on the title-page of this book; but we are
writing for fair readers of the 20th century.
Except in size, the books we allude to were as like as two peas. Chénier
might well have called them “old thoughts new versified.” To see one is
to see a thousand. The upshot of them all is the equality, if not the
superiority, of woman in regard to man. To give an idea of them it will
be enough to mention one, of no great renown (it has never been printed,
and no complete manuscript exists, to our knowledge), but linking the
names of two personages of the first rank. It was written for Vittoria
Colonna by her cousin the famous Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, vice-chancellor
of the Church of Rome.
The Cardinal begins by very gravely preparing to crush under a weight
of learning various anti-feminist propositions, almost all drawn from
the antiquated repertoire of the Middle Ages; for instance, is woman an
imperfect animal, an inferior being, unfit for public duties, good for
nothing but to gad about and commit indiscretions? Is it not the custom,
even in everyday talk, to say “men” when meaning the human species? Are
not the Bible and Plato agreed in teaching that man is the prototype of
creation, the receiver and the transmitter of life? Having settled these
and a few other questions, the cardinal proceeds to his demonstration of
the merits of womankind.
He finds it much to the point to invoke evidence from the pagan world.
He sets defiling before us the Sauromathian women, the warrior Amazons,
the women of the Balearic isles, every one of them esteemed equal to
three or four men in the exchanges of war; the Lycian dames, through
whom nobility was transmitted, and the Celtic ladies, who exercised the
functions of diplomatists and arbitrators. On this evidence he declares
himself an out-and-out feminist; an advocate for the admission of women
to all occupations; gymnastics and military service, commended by Plato,
have no terrors for him; he would have been an enthusiastic apostle of
cycling for both sexes. If some timorous objector hints at the moral
perils of launching women into public life, he almost angrily laughs the
objection to scorn, zestfully seizing the occasion to show what men are
good for when left entirely to themselves. His type is the strong woman,
sure of herself and cased in the armour of her modesty, the energetic
woman who fends off the light strokes of stratagem as well as the heavy
strokes of violence, the woman who is generous and just, with something
of that young Spartan captive who had the force of soul to feign love for
her vanquisher and to persuade him with her caresses that she was endowed
with a marvellous secret of invulnerability, and who thus got her head
cut off. “Heaven above!” ends the cardinal suddenly, “where could one
find a more accomplished type of strength and magnanimity than yourself,
O Vittoria! It is you, you, O ideal of noble virtues, who sustained your
husband, guided him, exalted him!” Pompeo has so many things to attend
to that he excuses himself from here working out this theme; he begs the
marchioness to accept his modest little work, the homage of an ardent and
sincere affection.
We are bound to add that women showed themselves duly grateful; this
kind of literature was not love’s labour lost, and many insignificant
men found in it the road to success. A Bohemian, half magian and wizard
(common enough in those days), a soldier as well as a “doctor in both
faculties,” Cornelius Agrippa, was elected professor of Cabala at the
University of Dole. Not long afterwards he dedicated to his sovereign,
Margaret the regent of the Netherlands, a bulky book on the _Preëminence
of the Feminine Sex_, a learned and convincing work, though in places
somewhat gross. The chaste Margaret was no more shocked than Vittoria
Colonna appeared to be angered at some indecorous details in the work of
cardinal Pompeo. She obtained a good appointment for Agrippa, and later
on, though a good deal had happened in the interim, she gave him the
title of imperial historiographer to Charles V.
Apart from these special productions, which in date almost all belong
to the early days of the decadence, the influence women exercised on
intellectual productivity ran through two very different channels.
The primitive Frenchwomen, who loved breadth and vigour, the women of
passion, mistrusted works of mere imagination; they sought for truth.
Philosophy and history were their intellectual pabulum, owing to their
taste for the clear light of truth, however solidly, even heavily
expressed. To become wrapped up, entangled, lost in art and mawkish
sentiment appeared to them the proof of inferior minds; to them the
supreme art was to be without art; they loved the beautiful simplicity
and impressiveness natural to minds that have mastered the subjects with
which they are dealing, and are masters of themselves.
But these women were not numerous, and are soon lost sight of. Nor were
there many men capable of meeting their views.
History and philosophy had their charlatans who brought discredit on them
sooner or later—pedants, perpetrators of futile and vapid euphuisms, not
to speak of fantastics and high genealogists like Féron, who carefully
describes the armorial bearings of Adam.
Lemaire de Belges, who worked constantly under the eye of grave women
and dedicated to them all his writings of whatever description, even a
_Treatise on Ancient and Modern Funeral Ceremonies_, is one of those who
carried erudition too far. He has a superb equipment of learning, which
he displayed with a magnificent and conscientious tediousness; how could
Margaret of Austria, Anne of Brittany, and Claude of France distrust a
person of so excellent an appearance! Lemaire loses no opportunity of
rendering homage to the sex; if none occurs naturally, he invents one.
He cites only women of beauty and intelligence. In the service of Anne
of France he extols honour and virtue: with Anne of Brittany he sings
the past history of her realm;[365] and when all is said and done he was
nothing but a dull courtier. And yet he made his mark.
Philosophy comes better out of the ordeal. It was not divorced from
literature, and, like the literature, it wore a pleasing and cheerful
aspect. Laughter was then the fashion, even in the most serious clubs.
The Florentine academy flourished under the title of the “Academy of
the Damp,” each of its members bearing the name of some fish; and
when, as pretty generally happens, its founder, Lasca, was expelled,
he established another academy, under quite as facetious a name, the
“Academy of Bran,” the Dellacrusca.[366]
We have shown what an unrivalled position philosophy obtained in the
society of that epoch; many people preferred it to history because they
fancied they were more certain of finding truth in it. They found it
also of very practical utility; thanks to some familiarity with the
ideal, more than one philosophical husband could say, “All is lost, save
honour.” From the moment when the women began to subsist on philosophy,
there was a run upon theoretical wisdom. Happy the man whose academic
discourses suggested a comparison with Plato, or merely with Pythagoras!
Philosophy bore everywhere the torch of happiness; it gave props to
faith, and represented Paradise as the sum and crown of aesthetic joy;
the noble bishop Guevara exclaims with enthusiasm, “God was the first
lover in the world; it is from him that we have learnt to love”; and
grave professors on formal occasions waxed eloquent on the mystery
of love. Cornelius Agrippa opened a course of lectures on Plato’s
_Symposium_ with this declamation: “I come to expound to you the doctrine
set forth by the divine Plato in his _Symposium_, on love. My discourse
has Love for its author and cause; I myself, inflamed by the beams of
love, preach Love to you. Far from here, far from this respectable
lecture-room, let others, stuck fast in the miry paths of the world,
creatures of Bacchus or of the god of gardens, trample this divine gift,
love, in the mud, like dogs or swine. You, my pure men, votaries of Diana
and Pallas, hail to you! Come and lend attentive ears to this divine
mystery.”
Filippo Beroaldo goes farther; he undertakes “without false shame”
to expound to his young pupils the philosophy of Propertius: “Yes,”
he exclaims with fervour, “we shall give praise to love, the one god
laudable above all things, pre-eminently laudable; we shall show you that
the poetry and the poets of love consort with the gravest professors,
and that this sort of poem is worthy to serve as subject for a public
and complete course in a university of letters.” And forthwith we see
him occupied for a whole year in drawing a distinction between the work
and the writer, conformably to the aphorism of Catullus, that a poet
may perfectly well pass for a decent, chaste, and pious man, though his
works may not have the same reputation, provided they have salt and wit.
Ovid also had said: “My pen is lascivious, but my life is not.” Beroaldo
insists very strongly on this tutelary principle, and to add force to his
demonstration he casually reads the broadest passages in Plato and the
Scriptures: “Yet,” he adds proudly, “everybody reads the Bible.”
In addition to disseminating thus the doctrine of Love, the religion of
the Beautiful naturally delighted in beauty of form, and gave a very
decided lead on this point also.
In the first place, it brought into high favour a kind of literature
which, for brevity’s sake, we shall call the literature of conversation.
There is nothing surprising in this, since conversation served at once
as a means and an end, and appeared to be the realisation of Platonic
happiness. Those who had the misfortune to be writers took at least all
possible precautions not to show it, and certainly many authors of the
dialogues, novels, and various narratives of the time committed them to
paper only to keep a permanent record of actual conversations, or at
any rate because, in temporary distress for want of someone to talk to,
they found themselves reduced to taking up their pens to keep themselves
in practice. The critics of our day, who prefer to say their say by
themselves, in the form of lectures or articles, are disposed to see in
this dialogical method a trick of rhetoric; they regard the dialogues
of Plato in the same light, and we see very learned platonists quoting
indifferently the thoughts of the various speakers as the thoughts of
Plato himself, without remarking that in the same dialogue the different
speakers give sincere expression to different ideas. The majority of
16th century dialogues are real conversations,[367] and claim to be
more or less accurate notes of both sides, with the perfect liberty of
movement impossible in didactic exposition. Bembo, in his capacity as
an eminent talker, has accepted the responsibility for more than one
written dialogue. And thus, the practice was quite the reverse of that
which obtains in our drawing-rooms to-day, where, if the conversation
happens to rise above the commonplace, we borrow our ideas from the
morning’s leading article or the last successful play; in those days the
drawing-room made the book—a system extremely favourable to the influence
of women.
The masterpiece of this literature of conversation is unquestionably
the _Courtier_ of Castiglione, of which more than eighty editions or
translations are known, and which retained almost undiminished popularity
for more than a century.
In proportion, however, as women fell into mere fashionable sensibility,
the literature they inspired became an art of form rather than of
thought, and soon there was no longer room for anything but poetry.
Poetry flooded everything. We are not speaking here, of course, of the
high heroic poetry intended for robust appetites: people revelled in the
luxury of a beautiful musical phrase which soothed without awakening
emotion, in a sort of splendid unreality, in glittering frivolities
calculated to give a fillip to conversation.
There was high honour for the improvisatore who, in the decorated hall
of the château, whilst in the streets there arose a vague hubbub of
music, song, or passing feet, could on the spur of the moment chisel or
crystallise a happy thought, and shoot out his little verse, light as
an arrow, brilliant as a sky-rocket. Such a man was fêted everywhere,
and saw a welcome smiling in every eye. Into a goblet of rare crystal he
poured, as it were, but one drop of elixir, but it was an elixir that
exhilarated; he was master of his world. With a tender or witty verse a
man could do anything. A phrase of Bembo’s is very typical. When Vittoria
Colonna had just lost her husband, he told her that the flood of sonnets
on that occasion had reconciled him to the age! Vittoria Colonna herself,
whose ideas were of quite a different order in theological matters,
wrote to a prelate: “I received your letter this morning, and in your
madrigals I saw the force of truth.” Poetry was so much a maid of all
work that a luckless ambassador, at his wit’s end for a new way of asking
for his arrears of salary, ended by addressing a dispatch in verse to
his sovereign, Margaret of Austria. Another dropped into poetry in his
dispatches with the simple object of paying court to his princess. A
business agent, instructed to send some information to Vittoria Colonna,
declares that, writing to so illustrious a lady, he hardly knows what he
is about, and that he cannot refrain from writing in verse: hitherto,
he says, his higher faculties have been dormant, and the name of the
marchioness has roused them to activity. Admirable effect of feminine
influence, galvanising even auctioneers’ clerks! Ladies wrote in verse
to their children, sent their friends verses—sometimes, it must be
confessed, borrowed.[368]
In all this wealth of poetical production the sonnet ranked as the most
profitable, because, thanks to its terse and sparkling form, it did
well in a glass case among a woman’s little love trophies. It admirably
hit the tastes of the ladies; it was short and concise, it centred on
one idea, and allowed the most diverse and fugitive sentiments to find
expression.
In these days we cannot really understand the success which certain
occasional verses met with, for example, the rhapsodies of Molinet[369]
whenever Margaret of Austria took her walks abroad. These gems of other
days have the same effect on us as pearls removed from their settings,
lying robbed of all their lustre on a dealer’s counter. For that matter,
they never had the glow of passion; all that was asked of them was to
show a certain uniformity of sparkle, and they were strung one after
another in the belief that so many languidly gleaming brilliants would
in the long run form a pretty set. What charming and unexceptionable
ornaments were the waggeries of Saint-Gelais or of Michel d’Amboise,
or the “Hundred and Five Love Rondeaux” published by M. Tross, or the
_Hecatomphile_ (_i.e._ the hundred loves), and so many more![370] Such
writers had ringing in their ears an air from Ovid[371] or Petrarch,
a mawkish air, with all the sublimity of commonplace, already utilised
a thousand times; and they continued to grind out the song of the
“exquisite” bard of Laura, to steal from it, comment on it, torture it,
raising their eyes to heaven like Greuze’s girls; and so they thought
themselves deities. “I hope,” cries Aretino, with a burst of laughter,
“that the soul of Petrarch is not tormented in the other world as it is
in this!” They were a long way from the vigorous inspirations craved by
Pompeo Colonna. Some repining souls made secret reservations against
the seductive force of this sensibility. Vittoria Colonna and Isabella
d’Este kept a corner of their heart for Dante; but what could they do to
stem the tide? They tried, very clumsily. In France a league of terrible
pedants was formed,—“skimmers of Latin,” who, to separate themselves
from the vulgar, employed a sort of pretentious and intolerable jargon.
In Italy, Spagnuoli shouted himself hoarse in thundering against the
Franco-Italian alliance, and all in vain. Capilupi,[372] still less
adroit, committed the unpardonable folly of finding fault with the women.
At bottom he was right.
It was women’s duty to warn the world off so disastrous a reef.
Unhappily, in consequence of that eternal timidity and that want of
energy which were to kill their influence, they allowed themselves to be
utterly bewitched. It was written that they should be able to conquer,
but not to profit by victory: that, once mistresses of the world,
feebleness would regain the upper hand; that being no longer under the
spur of passion, they would come to a stand before a sweetstuff shop.
The masterpiece of these pretentious confectioneries was a monument of
verse erected to the glory of some particular lady.
Jeanne of Aragon was during her lifetime the object of a deification of
this sort, in which the Academy _de’ Dubbiosi_[373] at Venice proceeded
according to the forms employed at Rome in the ceremony of canonisation.
There was first a preliminary decree, then a discussion on the proposal
made by some member to share the apotheosis between the exquisite Jeanne
and her sister the Marchesa dal Vasto; then a decree, based with great
parade of learning on the opposition of Roman pontiffs in bygone days
to Marcellus’ project of dedicating a temple to Glory and to Virtue in
conjunction, and enacting that the honour was to be reserved for Jeanne
alone, and that it would be enough to offer incense to the Marchesa dal
Vasto in sundry allusions.
The temple was erected. It was in the purest Renaissance style;
cosmopolitan, artistic, feminist. Its contents were pretty enough:
Ruscelli celebrated the charming, adorable and divine Jeanne in
respectable verse. But that only shows how the finest things suffer most
when reality is replaced by sham. Miscellaneous heaps of poems in all
languages known or unknown, Hungarian, Hebrew, Syriac, Slavonic—what was
it but sham? In reality, the truly artistic idea was absent.
There was also, especially in France, a whole literature dealing with
poodles and little birds, which was not lacking in charm, and above all
in sensibility, for it was generally elegiac. Saint-Gelais, Eustorg de
Beaulieu and Marot, like Catullus, mourned sparrows, such as that of the
unfeeling Maupas:
Las, il est mort (pleurez-le, damoyselles),
Le passereau de la jeune Maupas;
Ung aultre oiseau, qui n’a plume qu’aux aisles,
L’a dévoré: le congnoissez-vous pas?
C’est ce fascheux amour ...
... Par despit, tua le passeron,
Quand il ne sçeut rien faire à la maistresse.[374]
Vert-Vert,[375] whose misfortunes touch us to this day, was a direct
descendant of the parrot of Margaret of Austria, which, having been
allowed to die during the absence of its mistress, was consequently
regarded as having died of despair. Du Bellay has devoted some of his
most exquisite verses to the memory of a little dog.[376] In short, as we
see, all these writings were inspired by a sentiment of tenderness, in
the manner of Berquin[377] or Florian. The Cardinal de’ Medici loved to
style himself “the knight errant.” Under the dainty hand leading them,
men seemed like meek and gentle sheep, somewhat emasculate perhaps,
incapable of a strong diet, but polished, sweet, gracious! Twit them with
losing their claws, they reassure you! If their interests or their pride
are ever so little touched, they are still masters of a pungent rhetoric!
Listen, behind the scenes (or even before), to Politian, that charming
angel,[378] calling an obscure antagonist named Mabillius, “scurvy knave,
carcase, lousy dog,” and so on.
But let us finish our portrait of women from the intellectual point of
view.
They did more than rub their faithful friends to a fine polish: they were
gradually drawn on and impelled to take up the pen themselves, cherishing
the secret idea of enabling the public to profit by the treasures of
their sensibility.
To write a book, even in verse, is not a crime. But how was it that the
women did not understand that in coming like professionals before the
public they were precisely breaking away from their own system?
They could, it is true, invoke the example of Spain, where women
displayed their learning openly and unabashed. But the position of Spain
was altogether different; there the women in question were ladies of
lofty imagination, who threw themselves with extraordinary energy into
regions of pure erudition; brilliant and famous women of high rank—the
marchioness of Monteagudo, Doña Maria Pacheco de Mendoza, the pretty
Isabel of Cordova, far richer in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew than in worldly
possessions; Catherine Ribera, the bard of love and faith; the two
“professors” of rhetoric at the Universities of Salamanca and Alcala;
Beatrice of Galindo, who taught the queen Latin; Isabella Rosera, who
preached in Toledo cathedral and went to Rome to convert the Jews and
to comment on Scotus Erigena before an array of dumbfounded cardinals;
Loysa Sygea, again, the most illustrious of them all, an infant prodigy
to begin with, then a Father of the Church, who could speak the most
outlandish tongues. These were women full of sap and energy, whom no one
was astonished to see taking by main force the first rank in the spheres
of literature, philosophy and theology; but were they really and truly
women? or rather, did they bring any new thing to humanity? Were they
apostles of happiness? No, they advocated the claims of reason as men
did, perhaps better, perhaps worse—that is all. The ideal of France and
Italy was different: it demanded more discretion. Women might be quite
as accomplished; the knowledge of Latin was so widely diffused among
them, even in the depth of the country,[379] as to be quite a matter
of course; many grappled with Hebrew; some people went so far as to say
that rhetoric was a virtue as necessary to them as chastity, if not
more so. Only, everybody was steadily faithful to the maxim that women
ought to rule by charm rather than intellectual accomplishment; and if
it was necessary to arm them for the strife, their supreme skill would
always lie in appearing unarmed, in keeping their minds free and winsome,
preserving unsoiled all the bloom of their excellent education, remaining
great ladies and “amateurs.”
Ought the women, at the time when the ultra-refined shrank from appearing
in print as a lapse from taste, as what Montaigne called an “idle
business,” to have descended into the arena and addressed themselves to
the heart of the commonplace and heedless man in the street? Ought they
to have done violence to their thought by printing it? You may address
the public in regard to the stern things of life, draw your logical
deductions from truth, hammer out your arguments, discuss history,
philosophy, theology, everything that is of iron and rock. But sentiment
has graces which only flourish well under glass; the true women of the
Renaissance were like orchids, choice and rare and delicately perfumed,
which close their petals at the first breath of air. The same modesty
which defended the purity of their bodies against every indiscreet
eye, and which smiled only on friends, seemed to envelop their souls.
They were not displeased to hear themselves called the depositaries
of “good doctrine,” or even to see jestingly attributed to them some
pretty work which obviously they had not written: Aretino was a very
clever and amusing flatterer when he made the actor in the prologue of
one of his most spicy comedies ask if the author of the piece were not
Vittoria Colonna or Veronica Gambara. But the most accomplished and
instructed woman of the world, Margaret of Savoy for example, never
tired of boasting of her “divine goodness.” Noble ladies did not take up
the pen, any more than a good housewife needs to handle a broom; they
readily dictated even private letters, with the splendid indifference of
Talleyrand, who, we may say in passing, knew his business very well. If
they are ever caught writing, it was for mere amusement, when they were
tired of painting, carving, working tapestry, playing the harp, singing,
maybe of dancing and riding; then they thought of their souls, if they
had time; they would read a psalm or a story; or to “escape idleness,”
to banish an idea that oppressed and persecuted them, they would
artistically chisel their idea in the form of a sonnet. Thus understood,
poetry is the divine art, and very few women have been able to resist it
from the moment when it appears to them the same thing as painting a fan!
Margaret of Austria delighted in etching in little poems her
recollections of the trials of her life, and (in absolute privacy) did
not even disdain to address some epistles in verse to her devoted friends
or her functionaries. The amiable Graville, the fair Chateaubriand, so
dear to Francis I., excelled in this pastime, and when we see Suzanne
de Bourbon herself contributing her share, we may well believe that the
fashion was general. But between that and proclaiming oneself a poet
there was a wide gulf, and when this was crossed, it was the beginning of
decadence, because the exquisite freshness and simplicity of the art soon
gave place to affectation. To women of simple artless charm succeeded
blue-stockings like Madame de Morel and her three daughters, or Madame
des Roches. Women writers arose, and the Academy of the Valois found it
quite natural to admit them.
Lyons was the capital of feminine poetry, and certainly it is there that
we can best appreciate how and why the women fell into the unfortunate
mistake of becoming professional writers. It was not wholly their fault:
they only succumbed to the temptation when they could no longer exert
their influence otherwise.
Lyons was the city of wealth and pleasure and elegance, the rival of
Paris in fashion, the “Florence of France.” It was often the headquarters
of the court.
Anne of France, as sovereign of the surrounding country, had at first
exercised there a very direct influence; and afterwards Margaret of
France went there more than once, and gladly, as into a friendly land.
The ladies of Lyons, envious of the “great and immortal praise” their
neighbours of Italy had acquired, were desirous of making their
influence also felt on men, and of doing honour to France in the
present and the future. It was nothing but music and poetry, poetry
and music.[380] Margaret of France smiled broadly at the universal
babblement. Up to a certain point, save for the somewhat excessive
development of sensibility, nothing was more legitimate or natural: the
husbands acted as archivists, piously classifying their wives’ papers
and cultivating their reputations. But a time came when it appeared
calamitous to leave to husbands alone the care of so many treasures. Du
Moulin, Margaret’s secretary, ventured to aim a blow at feminine modesty:
at the express request of her husband he published the works of Madame
Pernette du Guillet, recently deceased, taking good care to indicate his
intention of thus paying collective homage to “so many fair and virtuous
ladies of Lyons.” He encouraged others to make similar confidences.
The somewhat tame and sublunary verses of Pernette du Guillet were not
particularly flattering to the husband who had so well preserved them.
Pernette avows in all sincerity that she had never known happiness; how
could she have known it? She divided her abilities among so many things.
She spoke all languages, played every instrument, and was beautiful
in addition. The sentiments she expressed oscillate between a tender
sensuousness and bitterness of soul.
Louise Labé, the glory of Lyons, did better service for her cause. The
list of her virtues would fill several pages. Fair, rich, and well-bred,
a singer, a dancer, a horsewoman, and an Italianist, she drew in her
train such a flock of admirers, commentators, panegyrists, biographers,
and glossarists that her death did not quench the enthusiasm, but
occasioned a perfect mausoleum of poetry.
There has been endless discussion in regard to this fascinating woman.
Many a lance has been broken in regard to her virtue, of which the late
M. de Ruolz was formerly the self-constituted guarantor and paladin, but
against which, since his time, two erudite writers, themselves natives
of Lyons, Messieurs Gaullieur and Gonon, have brought heavy batteries
to bear. But that little concerns us, for we do not claim Louise Labé,
even theoretically, as one of the glories of pure platonism; she is
too self-confident and cock-a-hoop, has such airs of swagger and mock
languor; she smacks of decadence. And yet, though she did not, like
Pernette du Guillet, make the slight effort needed to defer publication
till she was dead, she does affect a modesty which is itself unpleasing.
It was not her husband who impelled her to appear before the world, it
was her friends; they insisted, swore to “drink the half of the shame”;
and then, “not to take the plunge alone,” she dedicated her book to
another lady, Clémence of Bourges.
These simpering affectations apart, Louise was sincerely convinced of
the benefits of feminine domination, and one feels that in boldly facing
publicity she was obeying a sentiment of duty. She resolutely encounters
the enemy, like a brave captain who dashes out of cover to rally his
disordered troops. She conjures women not to allow themselves to be
despoiled of the “honest liberty” so painfully acquired—liberty to know,
to think, to work, to shine. Happiness!—she no longer deludes herself
with the idea that she can promise it with certainty, or at least she has
awakened from the dream of attaining the absolute; but she tells herself
that “one can at least sweeten the long voyage.” She does not lose sight
of the fact that it is women’s function to diffuse sweetness and poetry,
to mitigate unsociabilities, to inspire men with energy. The experience
already gained does not strike her as discouraging; quite the reverse;
the intellectual life takes from day to day a more splendid amplitude,
and this amplitude results from the action of women. The moments of all
great intellectual vitality are marked by love. So said Louise Labé.
Tullia d’Aragona, who sustained the same theory in other terms, was
one of the few Italian women who did not fear to be reputed authors,
probably because her place was already only on the fringe of society.
In general she employs few circumlocutions, but goes straight to the
point with a vigorous eloquence. Her poems, almost all addressed to men,
deal with subjects of the gravest kind, particularly with religion.
Tullia had the inestimable advantage of knowing humanity from top to
bottom. Beside her, Calvin and Ochino are as innocent as babes, and she
taunts them, not unfairly, with dealing their blows blindly without
distinguishing between what is serious and what is harmless. Her own
wisdom is wonderful! The poet Arrighi cannot help exclaiming, “Vittoria
Colonna is a moon, Tullia a sun.” She celebrates pure love in the true
lyrical and forceful strain, as “the magnificent, the admirable madness
which alone produces great enterprises.” Whilst immaculate women like
Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara too often stifle us with languorous
sensibility (“When I was a happy lover, I exhaled the harmonies of my
heart in calm and pious accents”), Tullia, who has long ago lost this
tranquillity and these religious illusions, knows that will and action
are needed; she does not ask for the impossible, but on the other hand
she valiantly excommunicates Boccaccio with his “villanous novels,”
before whom the coy ladies of fashion bow their faces to the earth. In a
dialogue with two gentlemen, she discourses on love in quite a platonist
key; she investigates its casuistry: “Is the end of love its limit? Is
it better to love or to be loved?” She prefers to be loved, this fair
artist, because in loving we are acted on by the motive force, while in
being loved we exert it. Women who have really loved will perhaps be of
a different opinion; nevertheless there in one line we have stated the
great contention of the time. The art of women ought to have been to make
themselves loved and to constrain men to love; they were often caught in
their own toils; they loved, and consequently instead of receiving they
gave. “The heart has reasons reason never knows.”
These few notes on the literary work of women suffice to show that, on
the whole, feminine literature, except in Spain, sprang from love, to
return to love again. No great influence in the intellectual crisis
of the Renaissance can be attributed to these various writings; they
scarcely did more than develop more or less intuitively the platonist
philosophy.
On the other hand, women exercised an enormous intellectual influence
through their individual and personal action, especially in Italy. They
carried their charm into quarters which the mediaeval theologians,
so ready to style themselves the “doctors of the poor,” never
penetrated,—namely, among the poverties of the heart. They overlaid life
with that varnish of wonderful, singular sweetness which has never been
wholly rubbed off; they intellectualised society, and, in a country
essentially marked out as a prey for gold and luxury, they delayed the
moment when men were to be estimated merely by the gilding of their
ceilings or the thickness of their carpets.
The effects of their work north of the Alps are not very easily measured.
Resistance there was too strong; the masculine world was not easily
won over; men growled, for it seemed to them that women were plucking
their souls out, or wishing to degrade them, in proposing that they
should submit to—what? a sort of intellectual goodness. They refused to
hear women and intellect spoken of together. The Germans recognised no
intelligence in them apart from their domestic duties. What the Italians
called intelligence a German would call tittle-tattle, trickery, the
spirit of contradiction. They rejected such gratifications, and had no
intention of allowing Delilah to shear them. They would readily have
declared, like an arrogant character of M. de Curel, that there is
nothing in the world but egotism, and that the egotism which creates life
is of more worth than that which employs itself in providing life with
consolations. As to poetry, forsooth, they were tempted to receive love
serenades with a bucket of water. And if the Italians sneered at them
as barbarians, “brainless people,” they would answer them on the day of
battle by demonstrating how far mere brains and sensibility served a
nation. Erasmus dubbed “any man who was honest and learned” an Italian;
precisely, but what had the Italians come to with their beautiful ideas?
They wrangled, but they no longer fought.[381] “Don’t talk to me of the
Venetians,” said Louis XII.; “they don’t know how to die.” To know how to
die—that is life.
Virile, stern, frugal, poor, rustic often to boorishness, Germany in this
way kept up against the intellectual paradox the old disdainful warfare
of the empire against the priesthood, and once more the gulf was dug out
between body and mind, between matter and spirit, force and liberty. From
the banks of the Rhine a furious hail of missiles was directed against
the fragile aspirations of Italianism. Brandt published his famous _Ship
of Fools_,[382] reissued seventeen times between 1494 and 1520, a work as
much translated, copied and imitated in the Germanic world as Petrarch
was in the Latin world; a pungent and unjust work in which defile, as
in a booth at the fair, all the little grotesques which bring joy to
mind and heart—not merely, needless to say, old Turk’s heads like the
physician or the astrologer, but new types—the spectacled scholar, busy
nursing his own reputation under colour of Plato or Menander; the man of
the world, oiled and curled indeed, but a wit, a lover, a giddy-pate,
and a firm believer in the black art; no one is missing, not even the
explorer, at a period when the world was dreaming of free exchanges and
the demolition of frontiers, the age of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. In
the greater part of these adventurers the old German sees only arm-chair
travellers or tap-room oracles, and among the genuine travellers he
anticipates Sterne in distinguishing idle loungers, curiosity hunters,
liars, braggarts, conceited puppies, windbags, travellers in their own
despite, travellers fleeing from justice, felons, the innocent and
unfortunate traveller, the traveller for his own amusement. Hardly any is
forgotten but the sentimental traveller.
As to the poets, needless to say whether a genuine German scoffs at these
“gentlemen in _-us_,” a sort of intellectual Tartarins, who in actual
life lead old and even wealthy women to the altar.[383]
And thereupon heads grew hot, and men pointed to the decadence of morals,
the desertion of the country, the flocking of people into the towns,
and they laid the blame on Rome, the head of the movement—Rome without
a rudder, without a compass, drawn helplessly along by the new spirit
through which she was to perish.
Some years later, when in spite of everything the rising tide at last
made its force felt, the opposition changed front. People began to
twit Italian learning with superficial ostentation. A love for books
was laughed at. Ptolemy Philadelphus was a wonderful man, to be sure,
to collect forty thousand volumes at Alexandria! An ass might just as
well load himself with guitars and set up for a musician! That may be
admitted; but they did not stop there; and, notwithstanding all we
know of the violences of party spirit, we cannot help feeling somewhat
astonished when we hear a man like Marot contemptuously flinging the
epithet of “ignoramus” at the Rome of Leo X., or Melanchthon talking of
Italy as “Egyptian darkness, a prey to the worst enemies of literature
and study.” That seems the very last accusation that might have been
expected.
These German ideas were half French too, and consequently, in the hot
give-and-take of battle, imperial Germany and papal Italy, in spite of
some shrewd blows, maintained their positions well enough, whilst France,
caught between two fires, was shattered. At the very gates of Lyons, the
sweet city of feminism, the Germanists and Huguenots brutally replied to
all the poetry of the women with the jest of D’Aubigné: “When the eggs
are hatched, the nightingale stints his song.”
In addition to many earnest men and almost all politicians, believers
in authority and even in force, Italian dilettantism found other ardent
adversaries in France in the champions of the old _gauloiserie_, who
continued to dote on naturalism naked and unadorned, the syntheses or
analyses of the flesh. They felt insulted that anyone should wish to
impose on them a strained and uncomfortable Petrarchism with the idea of
toning them down. However, Petrarchism did not effect very much, and it
was assuredly not guilty of softening certain crudities and of replacing
by its mawkishness the twaddle of illustrious nobodies like Jean Picart,
Etienne Clavier and others.
Hence, in so disturbed an atmosphere as France then was, we should be led
to conclude that the influence of women was negative, in the scientific
sense of the word. Their work was like M. Pasteur’s. The soul of man was
stirred, agitated, overwhelmed by a host of imperceptible microbes; the
women did not furnish an infallible specific for preserving the health,
but sought to sterilise the noxious germs, to make the air pure and the
water clear.
Even after the squalls of the 16th century it cannot be said that no
vestige of their effort remained. For it is the characteristic of France
to be a complex and accommodating country, where nothing triumphs, but
everything succeeds, where nothing abides, but nothing is lost. To this
very day, an hour’s carriage drive through Paris takes you through the
last four or five centuries of our history. The feminism of the 16th
century brought down and deposited a new stratum of traditions: nothing
more could be expected.
The violence of the opposition prompts us also to find some excuses for
the timidity we have pointed out in high-placed women. Women genuinely
frank and fearless could only be found in humbler life. We have seen how
much difficulty Margaret of France, called to live in a circumscribed and
select society, had in determining her precise whereabouts, since she
met with nothing but contradiction around her. When her scared platonism
came at last, about 1540, to formulate as in Italy definite principles
of guidance through the pen of Héroët de la Maisonneuve, and a heated
contention was the result, Margaret prudently tacked about, and smiled,
now upon Héroët, now upon his adversary La Borderie.[384] And yet the
rein was felt,[385] and in her circle it became necessary to sing of love
in a more philosophic key. The fierce Des Périers himself, type of the
man who loves to bite, saw himself reduced to translating the _Lysis_ of
Plato, under the insipid title, “The Quest of Friendship.”
The victory thus remained a moderate and indecisive one, somewhat out
of proportion to the great enthusiasm displayed. The fine triumphant
treatises on the excellence and transcendent merit of women, those sacred
stones, relics of a forgotten worship, deserted dolmens, were almost all
Italian. Margaret showed some displeasure when she heard women ill-spoken
of; but she did not inspire glorious rhapsodies, like Vittoria Colonna
and many others. In France free discussion on the merits and demerits of
women continued rife.
Such wrangling was indeed an old French social pastime: everyone said his
say, with perfect liberty to change his mind, and a host of well-worn
sentiments more or less amusing were bandied about: “Eve was a woman, God
made himself man! There are no women among priests. It is very seemly
to sleep alone. I have never been in love or married, thank God!” In
the 15th century people succeeded for a moment in believing that the
intellectual level of their little pastime might be raised till it at
last attained the Italian perfection; a Norman named Martin Le Franc,
whom his duties as secretary to Felix V. had made half a pontiff, at one
moment threw out the grand phrase which was to set Italy on fire: “Women
are the apostles of happiness, because they are the apostles of universal
and necessary love.” A few little academies or _puys d’amour_,[386]
scattered here and there in Picardy and Flanders, caught eagerly at the
idea, but without deriving from it anything better than an encouragement
to the flowery verbosities of dead-and-gone chivalry, which they plumed
themselves on continuing. Then came the wild outbreaks in Germany to give
the finishing stroke, and when Brandt and Geyler[387] became the idols
of public opinion the French feminists blushed and turned tail. No more
monuments were erected to the glory of women, and even a masterpiece of
our art of engraving, an absolutely charming _Ship_[388] that appeared
about 1500, was devoted to their disparagement. It is a series of little
pictures, representing, to begin with, the inevitable Eve, and then
coquetry, music, dinners, perfumes, love. The author does not go so far
as to say that all these things are unutterably wearisome to him, but he
insinuates that in his opinion it is useless to look for any serious idea
among such frivolities.
The French were quite ready to admit that women had certain moral
qualities, like goodness and devotion; a woman who had only one shift
would give it away, they knew. A writer puts into Eve’s mouth a cry of
sublime self-sacrifice at the moment of her expulsion from the garden:
“Slay me,” she cries to Adam: “perhaps God will restore you to Paradise!”
And yet it was to her that he owed his expulsion. But the great
majority of Frenchmen very unjustly believed frivolity, inconstancy,
lack of originality to be defects inherent in the sex, and not merely
the result of an unfortunate education. If accomplished women quoted
Plato or St. Thomas they were laughed at, no one would believe that
they had an opinion of their own, but declared that they had got some
one to coach them, that “the doctrine was no deeper than their lips,
that they had no naturalness, that they disappeared under art.” A woman
was believed to be afflicted with the radical incapacity to acquire an
individual idea. Montaigne, who nevertheless boasts of being platonic and
anti-epicurean,[389] sums up all these old prejudices in flatly refusing
to regard woman as anything but a pretty animal. Virtue (the woman’s,
that is; Montaigne has different ideas) is corporeal fidelity: his ideal
is Anne of Brittany weaving tapestry in the conjugal bedroom. Montaigne
reluctantly admits that feminine coquetry may end in ennobling love,
but without changing its destination: “You can do something without the
graces of the mind, but nothing without bodily graces.” Thus, when Roman
and papal society claimed for women the absolute right to have done with
paint and powder, it fell foul of a host of preconceived ideas.
Frenchwomen did not firmly enough assert themselves. Their services
were accepted for domestic tasks, often delicate and difficult, which
necessitated much intelligence, but were considered servile or at least
inferior. Further, when they endeavoured to rise above this state of
bondage, they were checked, sent back to their idleness and frivolity,
persuaded that it was no duty of theirs to defend the great causes men
too often deserted; and they believed it. Here is a mass of useless
men, says the world: go to, let us match them with useless women! But
was it not a mistake thus to bury them alive, so as to prevent their
being too much in evidence? Was it right to inflict on the half of the
human species a malaise the more terrible because for the most part
the victim was unable to account for it? A woman who had all that is
apparently necessary for perfect happiness, and who nevertheless was
sick and unhappy by reason of the emptiness of her life, exclaimed:
“I feel I lack something. In my soul there are faculties stifled and
useless, too many things that are undeveloped and of no service to
anyone.” How many like her have there been at all times—women of deep,
vacant, ever virgin souls, who suffer through not giving themselves, and
live in maiden meditation, fancy free! And why? For the sole profit of
the selfishness of men! “No, this ought not to be,” warmly rejoined a
convinced spiritualist: “if men complain of seeing themselves equalled
or surpassed, more’s the pity: they have only themselves to blame. ’Tis
that they are unworthy of their women!” This was not the speech of a
Frenchman, but of a Roman prelate, Giovanni Monti, secretary to the pope.
CHAPTER V
RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE
The great effort that we have sought to portray resulted finally in a
profound religious revolution; starting from a crisis in belief, it led
to a transformation of Christianity through the ministry of women.
In reality, feminism exalted the soul rather than the woman. Woman is
born to cling to somebody; if man fails her she seeks a stay in God.
It was thus inevitable that her religion of beauty should end in a
mystic marriage, in a great dramatic act of religious sensibility, in a
development of charity and hope on the basis of definite dogma, in the
skilful interpretation of impressions of the unseen by means of external
signs.
That women would fling themselves passionately into religious sensibility
was only to be expected. This is their way.[390] Leaving out of account
those who are never happy out of church, women love to fancy themselves
queens by the grace of God. The incomprehensible, which irritates men,
fascinates them, and they experience a singular joy in rummaging the
mysteries. As we have already said, at the moment of the religious crisis
a courtesan proffered the most judicious advice on the direction of
ecclesiastical affairs.
In the Church, to mistrust the intrusion of women was a peremptory
tradition, and indeed the ecclesiastical world may well be considered the
citadel of anti-feminism. Religion had taken a logical and theological
bent; it recognised only one morality, applying to noble ladies and
eminent intelligences the rules taught to plainer folk. Erasmus repeats
approvingly the maxim of St. Paul: “Christ is the head of man, man the
head of woman; man is the image and glory of God; woman the glory of
man.” With the Church Fathers it had been a long-established custom
(going back to the wisest of the wise, Solomon) to compare women, and
even the Virgin, to the moon. From sacred literature this comparison
passed into profane literature, which employed it in season and out.
Rabelais declares that women play hide and seek with their husbands, as
the moon with the sun; Boccaccio and Brantôme revive the old proverb
about the virtue of women needing to renew itself every month like the
moon. One poet decries the moon, pale like woman’s love; another adores
her, pure like his well-beloved.
The platonists were well content with this phantasmagoric comparison,
which represented to them in all likelihood a whole world of freshness
and domestic joys.
Dolce himself deems that the moon is feminine. “At night,” he says, “she
streams through every chink and cranny, spite of blinds and shutters; she
inspires the imagination of husbands.” In France, during the period of
the fair Diana’s ascendency, the moon quite eclipsed the sun; the king
sported a device of interlaced crescents.[391] But the Church did not
go so far. It excluded women from the priesthood; its tradition granted
them nothing except personal piety, or at most heroism like that of St.
Catherine of Sienna of unfading memory. In order, therefore, to secure a
place in an absolutely new order of ideas, women had to wash their hands
once for all of eminent dogmaticians and subtle moralists, and to effect
a complete change.
Many enlightened minds in the Church itself called for this renovation.
The weariness and disgust generally felt in regard to certain
trivialities in religious observance, to the apologetics and the frigid
ethics of the time, had caused the spirit of faith and faith itself
almost entirely to disappear; and thus the Beautiful easily became the
guiding principle of theology. Only, some people sought their theology
in abstractions, others in the joys of art. The fall of Savonarola
precipitated the movement in the direction of art. His friends were
downhearted. Michelangelo clave to the Man of sorrows, the crucified
Christ, “as a skiff to the harbour”; his faith became confidence, and
dogmatic theology had no further interest for him.
So far from feeling itself harmed by this breath of philosophy, Rome,
ancient and eternal, regarded itself as invigorated thereby. “I am a
Christian platonist,” had been the saying of the early platonists.
Too proud to have any love for the petty arguments and the material
extravagances of every-day religion, these philosophical prelates wished
to establish the authority of the Church on the liberty, not the anæmia,
of the conscience.
The new philosophy declared itself to be more Christian than that of
Aristotle, and bowed before the official dogmas, like the priest before
the altar, declaring itself “unworthy”—before dogmas of almost insolent
authority, stern, inexorable, but modified by tenderness. The new
religion was the philosophy of the Lord’s Prayer. It sufficed to recite
the Paternoster in the spirit of love harmonising with it; regarding God
as the good Father, who gives life because He is life,—God, the celestial
and ideal, whose will should be done because it is the very essence of
love to seek its motives in the will of the beloved one. We love, not the
idols of the world, silver and gold, but love and mercy; our daily bread
is sufficient for us, love has loosened in us the springs of ambition;
filled with tenderness and dignity, foes to intrigue, we have to spread
abroad in the world this same tenderness and the tolerance it implies;
may God in like manner pardon the evil we may do. We beseech Providence
not to put temptation in our way, so that we may be saved from falling!
God is all love and all life. It is not His will to betray us by laying
snares for us; His religion can be only the perfect manifestation of
natural law. Goodness and piety do not mean pessimism and self-abdication.
The positive side of religion, namely, the creed, may well be left to
reasoners and theologians, for it gives rise to insoluble problems. But
religion also includes principles of practical morality, which have for
object the happiness of man.
In regard to the second point, the Gospel leaves us great liberty.
It lays down no dogmas in regard to beauty; it confines itself to
bequeathing us love, not a love more or less alloyed with selfishness,
vanity or interest, but a general love for God and our neighbours,
resulting from an inward spirit of devotion.
That being so, what is the good of quirks and quiddities? What is
the good of tight fetters? Love, and go straight on your way—that is
the new formula,—a very effective one, since it converts dogmas into
sentiments, and consequently gives them a direct bearing upon life;
a very philosophical one, for nothing is so personal, so individual
as sentiment. And, as Montaigne says, “it is a most excellent and
commendable enterprise properly to accommodate and fit to the service of
our faith the natural helps and human implements which God hath bestowed
upon us.... Had we fast hold on God by the interposition of a lively
faith; had we fast hold on God by Himself, and not by us; the love of
novelty, the constraint of princes, the good success of one party, the
rash and casual changing of our opinions, should not then have the power
to shake and alter our belief.”[392]
Faith is the best and almost the only guarantee of liberty of thought.
That explains why, in the official apartments of the pope, the _School
of Athens_, an eclectic homage to the philosophic spirit, is a companion
picture to the _Controversy on the Holy Sacrament_, the synthesis of
the spirit of faith, and why the _Parnassus_ appears to unite them. No
one found anything to object to in this alliance. Erasmus insists on
the fact that Christianity and Plato are in wonderful accord in regard
to happiness; Cornelius Agrippa himself, who ventured to call Plato a
“master of errors,”[393] attributes to Socrates inspiration from on high.
Leo X. acted as pope in countenancing Plato.
Mitigating circumstances have been urged in his favour; as the Roman
tradition excels in accommodating itself to the needs of each successive
age, some Catholic writers have thought that the alliance between
Roman prelates and the new aesthetic cult was a prudent concession to
circumstances. Our opinion, on the contrary, is that Rome, under the
influence of a century and a half of ardent study, deliberately placed
herself at the head of the movement. Rightly or wrongly, she believed
that religion is the art of living freely and in peace. “The soul is far
above the intellect.”
In virtue of this maxim there appeared, closely leagued with the prelates
for the purpose of reforming the Christian practice and restoring to it
its primitive motive force, the women, whether platonist or not, who
have been called _bibliennes_, but whom we would rather call Mothers of
the Church. In these days we stick pretty closely to the external and
picturesque features of the Bible; we read it as a story that has come
true, and love a realistic illustration. The _bibliennes_, too, after
their fashion, sought impressions, rather than a doctrine; for what they
called “my religion” was the doctrine of others, on which they drew their
own patterns, like figure-skaters. What concerned them in the Gospel was
its philosophy.[394] They wished to profit by it on their own system,
that is, by intuition, by inspiration from on high. Faith in witchcraft
flourished more than ever, and it seemed quite natural to regard women
as the special interpreters of the unseen.[395] The bloody persecutions
of the 16th century did not succeed in uprooting the belief in witches,
who sometimes indulged in horrid midnight abominations, but who were the
more habitually consulted by people who wanted to have their fortunes
told, to have their ailments treated,[396] to obtain good weather,
etc.[397] The boundless ambition of Julius II. sprang, it was said, from
the prediction of a sorceress, who had told him to be of good cheer,
for he would obtain the tiara and world-wide sway. The witches loosed
or bound the devil at pleasure. Their power was evil, but supernatural.
People said “witch”; in some parts the word “wizard” did not even exist.
If the witch was to credulous people the incarnation of women’s special
aptitude for medicine and religion, there was a good deal of truth in the
idea, and women might well be supposed capable of exercising supernatural
power. It was fashionable to extol the ancient sibyls in the same terms
as the prophets. These celebrated beings formed the connecting link
between antiquity and Christianity; instead of doing as Julius II.
wished, and painting the twelve apostles, in other words, the active
ministers of faith, Michelangelo boldly and triumphantly displayed on
the vaulted arches of the Sistine chapel seven prophets and five sibyls,
that is, the ministers of intuition.
Thus women substituted themselves for priests as they did for doctors,
from a horror of materialism and professionalism, from a sense of duty,
an idea of liberty, a spirit of charity, making no professions of
profound study, but with the wholesome aim of protecting the youthfulness
and beauty of their souls. Apostles of the religion of love and joy, they
addressed themselves to the miseries that befall especially those whom
the world calls happy; the unfortunate doubtless have no time to think of
their woes; it has always been much more difficult to convert the rich,
the healthy, and the young.
The idea of the feminine priesthood very easily made headway in Italy:
“God is only seen through women.” Women addressed themselves to chosen
spirits—philosophers, writers, preachers, men of action—who wished to see
God, but were too short-sighted. In the religious as in the other arts,
every prelate of importance had one woman, if not several, behind him.
Bembo was the friend of Olympia Morata[398]—what could be more natural?
A fiery, proud, austere monk like Ochino, with his large, bloodless face
and long, shaggy white beard, hardly seemed likely to prove a grand
master in the feminine freemasonry; yet he came in the end to lean upon
a bevy of ardent women, with Caterina Cibo, one of the pope’s ladies, as
their brilliant head. The pope himself came to terms with the ladies:
Paul III. displayed his deference for them on various occasions, and
especially by a visit to Ferrara, the notable seat of a feminist council.
Vittoria Colonna shines in the front rank of these Mothers of the Church;
she is the classical woman _par excellence_. She got up lectures at
Naples and Rome. She sustained and consoled prelates of the highest
eminence. “Since the hatred of others, the price I pay for my devotion,
has not bereft me of your Excellency’s good-will,” wrote Giberto from the
chancellery at Rome, “every other loss seems to me but a trifle. Your
Excellency can do me no more singular favour than to command me.”
Bishop Selva wrote to Cardinal Pole: “Thanks for the copy of your letter
to the marchioness of Pescara on recent events; it is worthy of that
Christian lady.” And the good Sadoleto, writing also to Pole, said: “I
have read the letter addressed to you by the very saintly and prudent
lady the marchioness of Pescara, in which she speaks of me and appears to
approve of our staying here; it is an indescribable pleasure to me to see
my counsels approved by so much virtue and wisdom.”
The holy passion of the marchioness for Cardinal Pole burned with a
highly mystical glow. Vittoria wrote to this beloved prelate “as the
intimate friend of the Bridegroom, who will speak to me through you, and
who calls me to Him, and whose will it is that I should converse on this
subject for my own encouragement and consolation.”
Religious feminism acclimatised itself in France with considerable
difficulty, through the fault of the women themselves. They were
habituated to tread unswervingly the authorised paths to Paradise—fasts
and abstinences, indulgences and pardons, relics, vows and pilgrimages.
To follow in the procession of Corpus Christi among their lackeys bearing
torches emblazoned with their arms, to wash the feet of the poor on
Good Friday and hand the poor a basket of provisions, never to miss a
sermon, to have a mass said every morning at a private altar, to purchase
indulgences—that was the religion of the great ladies of France. This
religion was accused of proceeding from a somewhat mechanical severity,
and of proving nothing; and indeed there were among those old-style
ladies some who were virtuous without purity, and some who were devout
without piety. Among the middle classes it was still worse: “angels
at church, devils at home, apes in bed!” How many husbands lost their
tempers at finding dinner not ready, and learning that Madame was at
her prayers or “slobbering over images”! An old writer declares that
there is no mean with religious women; they are either sour-tempered,
peevish or disagreeable, or adulteresses. And yet the same preachers
whom we have already seen obstinately bent on preserving the dead level
of morality vaunted equally the dead level of religion; they were
desperately afraid of getting above it. They liked women to remain
little girls, incessantly tormented by infinitesimal scruples; their
narrowness of thought, their passive and minute obedience were precisely
what the preachers praised, such were the traits they pretended to admire
in the Clotildes and Theodelindes.[399] And if the Saviour after His
resurrection went first of all to knock at the gate of the Magdalene’s
garden, that boon, according to them, was motived solely by the purely
passive and docile spirit of women. At Paris, where women were said to be
deficient in high philosophy, “there were more works of charity done and
more masses said than were done or said between Paris and Rome.” However,
certain flatterers saw virtue everywhere, and went so far as to cite
Charles VIII. as an angel, and the boulevards of Paris as a sanctuary.
Such reasonings naturally ended _in statu quo_.
At Rome the exact contrary was the case; liberty was especially rife
among the mob of functionaries, and their contempt for the easy-going
government they served was unmistakeable. Far back in the 15th century
Lorenzo Valla, to hasten his advancement, declared publicly that this
government rested on a usurpation and a lie. It was all so peaceful
and happy! More than one man, like Burckhardt, would kiss the pope’s
toe in the morning, and in the evening utter blasphemies. The dogma of
infallibility served as a shelter and defence. Just as Titian sent to
the Emperor a _Trinity_ and a _Venus_ together; or Sigismundo Malatesta
had a portrait painted showing him on his knees before madonnas; or
the irreverent Poggio destined his sons to the priesthood: so Aretino,
speaking of Saints and Venuses, lumped them all as “these ladies,” and
confessed before he died.
Far from being disturbed by theological attacks or stale criticisms, Rome
thought of nothing but displaying her Atticism and rescuing antiquity
from its submergence by medievalism, as she had already saved it from its
submergence by the barbarians.
The Spirit of God bloweth where it listeth![400]
As said the father of one of the cardinals, no man was a gentleman unless
he hazarded some heresy or other. The sceptic represented by Raphael
in the _Miracle of Bolsena_ is a man of high distinction. Ideas, men,
nothing was safe from ridicule. Two cardinals were chaffing Raphael for
having, as they said, given S. Peter and S. Paul rather too ruddy a
complexion. “Bah!” retorted the painter, “they are blushing to see you
ruling the Church.” Castiglione one day asked ‘Phaedra’ Inghirami, with a
smile, why on Good Friday, when heathens and Jews, heretics and bishops
are prayed for, there is no prayer for the cardinals. “Because,” replied
Inghirami with great readiness—“because they are included in the prayer
for heretics and schismatics.” The same Castiglione found the Duke of
Urbino’s chaplain to be rather long over mass, and begged for a more
expeditious celebrant. “Impossible,” replied the chaplain, and stooping
to the ear of his critic added: “Why, man, I don’t say a third part of
the _secretae_.”
The Lateran council in 1512 had, indeed, prescribed canon law and
theology as part of the course of study for priests. It recommended them
also to believe in the immortality of the soul. But these were only very
light fetters on liberty of thought. When Pomponazzi denied in set terms
the immortality of the soul, the Venetians, who had the logical minds
of the northern peoples, condemned his book to the flames; but Leo X.
did not even reply to the demand for his excommunication. Were there not
many like him at the Vatican? Were ceremonial and dogma spoken of much
otherwise there? The judgment we can pass on Rome is that of Talleyrand:
the man who does not know Rome does not know the sweetness of life.
At one time Adrian VI. was anxious to restore severer modes of thought,
but his aim did not please the prelates, and Clement VI. hastened to
bring back the spirit of the Medici, a “sentimental deism,” to adopt
the apt phrase of M. d’Haussonville, and to send “the imbeciles,
the ninnies,” as Bembo called them, about their business. The pope
supported the Protestants against Charles V. He was quite willing to
hear Firenzuola, in his Benedictine’s gown, read him fragments of his
dissertations on love. Paul III. plumed himself on continuing this
charming system. Bembo became a sort of patriarch; his _Asolani_ served
as well for a religious breviary as for a philosophic formulary.
Delightful age, in which nothing was hopelessly stranded in mediocrity!
in which the religion of beauty seemed to sum up all aspirations human
and divine, all the sanctities!
The cardinals displayed a reasonable magnificence because princes and
lords were essential to the kingdom of God on earth.
These were Christian prelates, charged with the duty of guiding a
somewhat pagan world. Among them we necessarily meet again the learned
doctors of love and wit—Bibbiena, for instance, his Plautus in his
pocket, always smiling, always amusing, and philosophising with gusto on
the oddities of the moment. “What folly!” is his incessant exclamation.
A priest, but one of the fashionable variety! Steeped to the lips in
mythology, and so refined, so delicate, that the naïve emotions of
a primitive Madonna leave him untouched! Wishing with his exquisite
politeness to offer a royal present to Francis I., he ordered, not a
Madonna, but a portrait of the beautiful Jeanne of Aragon. That is the
man who in the portrait of Leo X. stands near the pope’s chair as the
heart of his heart.
And Bembo, who invokes Olympus and speaks of the supreme Beauty, how
does he regard the sacred hierarchy? He writes to Isabella d’Este that
he “desires to serve her and please her as if she were the pope.”...
“Far better to speak like Cicero than to be pope.” And he adds this
postscript: “Isabella, my dear, my dear, my dear, I kiss thee with all
my heart and soul, and beg thee to remember me, as my big, big love for
thee merits.” That was his interpretation of charity! But people were
not particularly scandalised at these youthful sallies, any more than it
occurred to them to be shocked at finding a bishop’s palace peopled with
mythological personages,[401] or the Corso, on a carnival day, gay with
masked cardinals.
This intellectual indifference would have had graver consequences if,
knowing theology so badly as they did, the clergy had attempted to
expound it; but as a matter of fact they only scratched the surface of
dogmas; they were far too sensible to speak of things they knew nothing
about. The watchword was to render religion lovable. In what respect was
Sadoleto, for example—that Fénelon of the 16th century—a worse priest
because he was so passionately devoted to the humanities and the arts!
Take liberty away, and the degeneracy of Catholic countries was assured.
To-day everything is changed; if Leo X. or Bembo returned to the world,
they would be utterly nonplussed by the complete alteration that has
taken place. It is in Germany, among their whilom adversaries, that they
would recognise the doctrine dear to them, and a freedom of mind that
allows a man to call himself a Christian though rejecting the divinity of
Jesus Christ. To many present-day Germans, the kingdom of God stands for
the whole community of those who believe in the principle of love. God
is love: the kingdom of God—that is, a state in which everyone’s actions
would be prompted by love—is the final end of God, and at the same
time the most universal moral ideal, the sum and crown of morality and
religion. Singularly enough, people are apt to imagine—not, of course,
that the founders of the Reformation professed this doctrine (the mistake
would be too glaring), but—that they opened the door, cut the first notch
in the tree, by starting the private reading of the Scriptures. Thus
Protestant orthodoxy, which holds by a priestly and quasi-infallible
tradition, would appear as a pseudo-catholicism, whilst liberal
Protestantism, which pushes forward with open mind in a boundless field
of thought, would represent the logical outcome of the work of Luther and
Calvin.
On the other hand, it is believed by some that the armour of authority,
the spirit of narrowness and officialism sometimes adopted by
Catholicism since the struggles of the 16th and 18th centuries, are
indispensable to it, and that the Reformation was calculated to rid it of
that spirit.
On the contrary, it was at Rome that liberal ideas with the utmost
audacity secured a footing. They were vanquished, it is true, and
disappeared; but if Luther and Calvin had the glory of defeating them,
time in its turn has brought in its revenges, and, of Luther as of
Calvin, there is very little now remaining.
The liberal Protestantism of the present day is the antithesis of the
primitive spirit of the Reformation.
The Reformation had political and social sides, of which this is not
the place to speak; in matters religious, the reformers felt a need of
disciplinary reorganisation, very natural, but not peculiar to them;
but their essential aim was to create a reaction against free thought,
to return as far as possible towards the Middle Ages, to rescue the
world from the Roman idealism, which was the work of prelates and women,
and had sunk into an intellectual dilettantism. Old Germany desired
matter-of-fact, or at any rate well-advertised virtues, a quasi-military
pietism, and theological reasoning. It revolted against life in the
sunlight.
Frenchwomen were not thwarted by their husbands in regard to their
patronage of the aesthetic cult, as they were in matters of morality.
The majority of men professed a benevolent scepticism, which made them
what we call “moderates,” that is, not warm partisans of moderate ideas,
but moderate or even negative partisans of any idea whatever; and
consequently they were open to any sort of impulsion, even from women.
Montaigne wanted but one thing to make him a mystic—namely, mysticism:
and the Montaignes are legion; only we do not come across them; in their
characters of moderates they keep in the shade.
In this case the obstructors were the clergy, the mass of whom in France,
as in England or Germany, made common cause with the nation, instead of
the nation making common cause with them, as at Rome. They possessed
about a fifth part of the land, and found themselves tied to it. The
village parson, sprung from the soil, and presented to a benefice on
leaving school, did his duty there without hope of advancement, in the
same spirit that the lord performed his feudal duties—rather like a
superior farm-hand, much less accomplished in theology or in platonism
than in mixing a sauce for a choice carp, or in roasting to a turn the
pullet he brought home under his arm on his return from administering the
last rites to a dying parishioner; a jolly good fellow, and a capital
gossip, but as far from a mystic movement or a crusade on behalf of the
ideal as the poles. If there was to be a Reformation, the only one that
would have struck him as useful would have been to authorise him to
marry; and French statesmen, although very good Catholics, were very much
of the same opinion. Obviously it was still more impossible to depend,
for upholders of the ideal, on a mob of artisans, tradesmen, peasants
even, highly practical people, who had got their poles shaven in order to
come under the jurisdiction of the church courts, and who, though clerks
only in name, still helped to root the Church among the people.
To meddle with this obscure and doltish mass with the idea of implanting
in it the germ of the beautiful was the last thing women would have
thought of.
There remained the world of distinguished abbés, the higher clergy, the
court prelates; but, as benefices served to reward merit of the most
various kinds rather than to encourage a philosophic system, the upper
ranks of the French clergy showed a curious mixture—eminent priests,
venerable monks, younger sons or merrybegots of great nobles, professors,
judges, men of letters. No one who did not know would ever have suspected
that Melin de Saint-Gelais was an abbé.
Fausto Andrelini was not at all ashamed to publish a letter to his
mistress side by side with an address to the Cardinal of Amboise, in
which he solicited ecclesiastical preferment.
The _bibliennes_ put themselves at the head of this motley crew of
great churchmen; they were “clergywomen,” as someone satirically said,
and formed the new priesthood, the Salvation Army of that time. Their
simple ambition was to raise these men, these priests, by one stroke
of their pinions, into the empyrean, as in Italy. Convinced doubtless
that—to adopt the phrase of a distinguished lady—“the law of sex and its
pious mysteries lead to great sanctity,” they saw shining in the supreme
light various groups united by sympathy and tenderness—old St. Jerome
sustained by young Paula, Francis of Assisi by sweet Clara; following
their example, Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, Vincent de Paul
and Louise de Marillac were going to lend each other mutual support,
obedient to the eternal law—to say nothing of innumerable holy maidens
who were lovers of Christ “in His sacred humanity,” like St. Theresa, or
who encircled their finger with the ring of a mystic marriage, as Jeanne
de France did when founding the Annunciade.[402] Faith must needs become
love and diffuse a thrilling charm:[403] the priest must cease to fancy
himself a policeman. How many poor souls, athirst for love, have fallen
very low simply from want of an ideal! There are sick ones who might
become artists in sensibility! Women stretch out beseeching hands to God,
that He may help them to regard life with confidence, with joy, with love.
Margaret of France was, in the highest degree, one of these French
_bibliennes_, no debater and indeed sceptical as to the existence
of absolute truth and goodness in this world, but a woman of quick
intuitions and contemplative mind. She had faith; she believed in the
sacraments,[404] and did not deny purgatory; she in no manner sought with
the ladders of reasoning to scale the verities that tower far above our
reach; she preferred to take to herself wings and fly aloft. Men appeared
to her so petty, so feeble, such ants, that a few merits more or less on
their part were but insignificant stages in the long road between them
and perfect goodness; she represented God to herself as pure kindliness,
indulgence and love, wherefore it was necessary to fly towards him on
wings of love. She clung to St. Catherine of Sienna, not as a theologian,
but because “nothing but love was her argument.”
This simple explanation of their principles will clearly show in which
species of clergy the women would seek their allies; they loved those
who loved them. They did not appreciate the courtier bishop who played
the hunter or the warrior. Their friends were the scholarly prelates;
they knew well that platonic love had little hold, alas! on the brilliant
youth of France, and that divine love would not easily subdue them; yet
by dint of tenderness they did not despair of success. The protonotary
D’Anthe fell sick, and Margaret at once sent him the following
prescription—a decoction of “pleasant recollections and sure hope of
love,” a little “powder of laughter,” a drop of “true felicity,” an
extract of “apple of love,” in short, remedies not in the least heroic.
The gay Bandello’s cure was effected with a rich bishopric, that of Agen.
Grave charges have often been brought against this combination of piety
and love, and naturally, anyone who does not understand platonism
will see a multitude of more or less deplorable _arrière-pensées_ in
these “spiritual gallantries.” In the 17th century indeed the grave
Nicolle[405] found a happy phrase to describe ecclesiastics who dangled
about the petticoats; he calls them “half-married priests.” “Marriage”
would be an inept name for the unions of which we speak. It is very
natural, surely, that women of feeling should seek their friends and
fellow-workers among feeling souls! Besides, experience proves that you
can do nothing with reasoners except by force; only the sensitive are
converted; only St. Augustines have capabilities for good.
The practical programme of the women consisted first of all in their
attaching an extreme value to the development of the sensuous elements
in worship; the severity of the Reformers, crudeness and bareness of
ceremonial, could never attract them; they loved pomp and decorum.
Religion to them was the very essence of art; art in becoming elevated
shaded off into religion; only the inexplicable thrill of the awakening
aesthetic sense can waft the soul from the expressed to the unexpressed.
Pleasure is not the end of art; it is only its vehicle. The end of art is
God.
Eglises viz, s’écrie Marguerite, belles, riches, anticques,
Tables d’autelz fort couvertes d’ymaiges
D’or et d’argent....
Je prins plaisir d’ouyr ces chants nouveaulx,
De veoir ardans cierges et flambeaulx,
D’ouyr le son des cloches hault sonnantes
Et par leur bruyt oreilles estonnantes:
C’est paradis icy, me dis-je alors....[406]
One Good Friday, at Brionne, a Norman châtelaine was highly scandalised
at the fantastic manner in which the parson rendered the Litany of the
Passion; and on leaving the church, she sent for him and the following
dialogue ensued: “My dear sir, I don’t know where you learnt to officiate
on such a day as this, when people should be in the depths of humility;
but to hear you render the service, all our devotional thoughts have been
put to flight.” “What do you mean, Madam?” said the parson. “Mean! you
have sung the Passion all the wrong way. When our Lord speaks, you bawl
as if you were in a market; and when ’tis Caiaphas speaking, or Pilate,
or the Jews, you speak as gently as any blushing bride. A fine sort of
parson! If you had your deserts, you’d be unfrocked!” The parson wriggled
out of the difficulty like a true Norman, with a gibe at the Jews: “My
dear lady, I wanted to show that with me Christ is master and the Jews
are subject to Him.”[407]
A sort of external sensuousness in worship, therefore, formed an integral
part of the feminist religion. As to the substance of that religion, it
varied according to the women, and even according to the days, for it was
a matter of impressions.
It was fed principally by the reading of the Scriptures.
It is a common error to believe that Luther’s great reform consisted in
inculcating the direct and free reading of the Scriptures. The study of
the Bible was, one may say, carried to excess among Catholic women. Vivès
went so far as to make it one of his principal rules for the education
of young girls.[408] And some people even vigorously protested against
the abuse of such reading. Before Luther’s time, about 1504, the French
satirist Gringoire, as well as certain preachers, denounced it as a
positive scourge.[409] Later, Brantôme waxed indignant at seeing the
Bible in the hands of children, and Montaigne at finding it discussed at
street corners or in back-shops.
But the women in their turn were irritated at the attempts to curb their
zeal. These criticisms of men recalled to them that contemptible sneak
Adam, who made excuses for himself and shuffled on to his wife the
responsibilities of their common thirst for knowledge.
Was their imagination distrusted? they asked. Were they thought incapable
of distinguishing between “ancient rubbish and modern trash”? They
found in the Old Testament rare beauties, to be sure, but they were
very far from admiring everything blindly—the exploits of some of the
patriarchs—the inconsistencies even of the Deity himself, who forbids
slaughter and yet slew! No, no, the Bible is not the book of love; it
is the first of books, but one mustn’t go there to find the secret of
“changing all strifes into sovereign charity.”
The Old Testament pleased the friends of the religion of
terror—Savonarola, and some French ladies of the old style, devout and
mystical at certain moments, but in reality highly materialistic in their
tastes and their practical ideas.
Others criticised the Bible as they did everything else. In the Bible,
as in other things, what struck them most was the light it threw on
life. An artist stops before a landscape, not to analyse the chemical
action of the trees, or to discourse on the species of grasses, but to
seize the charm of an effect of light, of a picturesque undulation of
the ether; at another time, when the light falls differently, the very
same landscape would not even attract his attention, because its garb
would be less striking. We do not well understand the synthetic religion
of these women, we men of “fluid and curt speech,” habituated to analyse
everything with mathematical precision—and not to look for grand opera at
St. Paul’s. The practised eye of a Renaissance princess allowed itself
to be caressed by tints, while our own seeks geometrical outlines. For
the Italians and their friends to love was to pray:[410] so that in the
_Heptameron_ conversations half philosophic, half ribald, come naturally
between mass and vespers, and Louise of Savoy mingles with them a feeling
homily, or reads a passage from St. John, “meat so tender ... full of
love.”[411]
The reader will understand how difficult it is to state with any
exactitude the developments of such a doctrine; they were different with
different people, and are to be felt rather than explained. We have not
to do here with students shut up in a smoke-filled hall to construct
their theses; it is a question of ladies, very great ladies, habituated
to the most perfect liberty of action, and permitted by their rank and
intelligence to hold direct communion with God, by vision, by intuition
of love. They are recognisable by this characteristic. In her work the
_Adoration of the Magi_ (a subject well worthy of her pen) Margaret
of France gives us her formula: “To initiate oneself into the divine
verities, first by philosophy, then by intuition, then by inspiration.”
Do not mistake, this is not illuminism or pride: it is simply candour.
These noble ladies do not grudge their pity to human misery, though
the sight of wretchedness is shocking to their nerves; but they set
themselves high above these miseries, just as they do above discussion.
Their religion is distinguished. They live on sovereign heights, where
they have no trouble from men and are in touch with their goal. God is
the first link in a chain, and man the last. As Gerbert said: “In matters
of action, mankind holds the first place: in pure speculation, God comes
first.” It is meet to follow God rather than man. And those who are
able to mount high are compelled by conscience to go to the fount and
origin of things, and look ideas square in the face. In this respect the
truly primitive women of the 16th century are sharply distinguished from
their daughters of the 18th, whom it is natural to compare to them. The
exquisite and delightful woman of the 18th century was very superficial:
she loved life and the world for their own sake. A few hours before she
died Madame Geoffrin,[412] hearing at her bedside a discussion on the
best means of securing general happiness, roused herself once more to
exclaim: “Add the diligent quest of pleasure, a thing not sufficiently
attended to.” A profound and true saying, remarks D’Alembert, and one
that Plato himself might have envied. The 16th-century women had a less
sparkling wit, but a much more strongly marked temperament. They were
concerned only with brotherly love, and instinctively recoiled from
intolerance in any form; they wished to fuse the church with the ideal;
to them every idealist was religious; but they also carried into the
world the pursuit of this high aim of their aesthetic religion—to live
for the soul, for God, to live a secret inward life along with the actual
life. We may justly praise their piety, their charity towards the poor;
and yet they were a mixture: external observances were repugnant to them
as being material and obligatory; they loved the large philosophical
faith, God and His works.
Here there is more than ever reason to speak of a “stork-love.” What
platonism had attempted, religious idealism effected—the superposition
of two different worlds. It was vain to expect these great ladies to
throw any ardour into terrestrial controversies: Renée of France made her
protégé Richardot a Calvinist or a Catholic bishop, indifferently. The
material mechanism of divine grace appeared to them to have been devised
for the vulgar, and to be of a quite relative truth. They did not see why
the delicate ray of grace, the impalpable word of consolation, before it
could penetrate into the dark haunts of wretchedness, should necessarily
have to borrow the form of a bearded monk or an unkempt parson splashed
to the chin. They would rather hear with their own ears that still small
voice which said to St. Theresa: “I will not henceforth that ye commune
with men, but only with angels.”
Priests were men appointed to the service of the Church, and not
demi-gods. Some were pleasant and cultured, just as there were excellent
abbesses; but to spend one’s life in the vestries, or not to be able
to move a finger without referring to one’s clergyman, struck Margaret
as sheer insanity. For herself, she would rather talk with a sceptic
or a clever atheist than with a vulgar parson, because after all the
atheist would aid her to accomplish her end, namely, to draw near to God
through the Beautiful. Nothing was more natural than to love God and
abase oneself in deed and in truth before Him, God being intelligence and
King of kings; but what was the good of intermediaries, often so gross?
Clément Marot, who saw through Margaret with wonderful acumen, defines
her as “woman in body, man in heart, angel in head.” The friends of
the princess declare that “from the age of fifteen she seemed directly
inspired by the spirit of God, in eyes and features, in gait and speech,
in all her actions.”
The Bishop of Meaux assures her that by reading a translation of the
Gospels he offers her she will be as a holy apostle and will receive
directly the Spirit of God, just as well, he adds, “as when we” (that is,
the common herd) “receive Him in the Eucharist.”
Thus the women aimed at being angels and the word of God. In this lofty
mysticism, they exhibited a striking contrast to the easygoing and
lukewarm Catholicism of the mob.
Some of their writings permit us to recognise how, little by little, this
great religious work was accomplished in their emotional life.
Vittoria Colonna has left us the type of the final prayer of the
Renaissance: a petition for peace and happiness in this world and the
next.[413] It is an aspiration, a strain of sweet and tender music,
a melody of Gounod, rather than a doctrine: it is the result of the
co-operation of souls in one common striving toward the most perfect joys.
We have under our eyes the works of three Frenchwomen who, though
contemporaries, show us the progressive stages of this co-operation.
The first, Gabrielle de Bourbon, Dame de la Trémoille, still preserves
in her _Château_, “a feminine work,” as she says, a character of
morality rather than art. The spirit which will renew everything, chisel
everything, which is gaily to open doors and windows, has not yet come
by. Within, no doubt, there are ravishing delights—apostolic visions,
prophets and sibyls on the vaulted arches as at the Sistine; angel’s food
distributed amidst a floating radiance of light! But all is regular,
inflexible, and severe; the contemplative heart has begun by employing
the besom of discipline.
And externally this castle of the Christian soul, somewhat resembling the
Alhambra, shows a rugged and bristling front. Love fires the cannon on
the ramparts, whilst Inspiration surveys the country round, and in the
tiny garden of Felicity where flows the stream of Pity, good souls gather
exquisite white flowers, luscious fruits, and leafy branches.
In another work, the _Spiritual Journey_, a story of the adventures of
a soul wandering upon the earth, Gabrielle undisguisedly raises her
standard against the new divinities—Presumption who loves flowery paths;
Self-love, hostile to terrible dogmas; Vain-glory, uncommonly like
Margaret of France. Poverty and Virginity are still her friends, and she
gives a naïve, heart-breaking, monstrous description of the world—a giant
with innumerable hands, each quivering tentacle of which, at odds with
the rest, brandishes some weapon, a book or a sword. Charity defeats this
monster, Faith triumphs. Gabrielle de Bourbon, as she herself said, wrote
for the simple; she did not plume herself on “understanding Holy Writ.”
But ere long comes a genuine noblewoman, Catherine d’Amboise, lady of
Beaujeu, who in her _Devout Epistles_ utters this loyal cry:
J’ay transgressé tous les commandemens ...
Pour abréger, aucun je n’en excepte.[414]
She has only one noble thing left to her—her heart; and that she offers
to God. Then follow effusions in a lofty strain, full of antiquity,
biblical allusions, “sibyl songs,” a plea for mercy and love; and Christ
puts on her finger the ring of peace, benediction, and remission of sins;
He becomes her spouse and lover, and for guardian gives her an angel.
With Catherine d’Amboise we win to a wondrous pleasant and aristocratic
paradise, composed of “fair manors and castles.” To the 15th-century
woman has succeeded the _biblienne_.
Margaret gives the last upward impulse above the anonymous and often
ill-thought-out work of the crowd: to prove her independence, she adopts
an abstract and lofty aim.
Not that everything is admirable or even comprehensible in her mystical
works. Her correspondence with Briçonnet, where, in interminable
letters of eighty or a hundred pages, she twaddles about “confection of
tribulations,” “old skins” of the spirit; various writings of hers—_The
Mirror of the Sinful Soul_, the _Strife between Flesh and Spirit_, the
_Orison to Jesus Christ_, the _Orison of the Faithful Soul_—these are
very curious, precisely as types of incomprehensibility and the despair
of reason. They do not evidence a very placid psychology: “Worse than
dead, worse than sick”—such is the author, according to her mottoes;
there were days when she hated doctrine of any kind, the Bible, the
Gospels included.[415]
She learnt the death of her brother intuitively, in a dream. From that
time the world crushed her; mystics know that thus “the incorporate soul
makes her course for the port of salvation.” Margaret’s mysticism became
a blind infatuation,[416] a drunkenness of love, in which divine and
human elements were commingled,[417] and which manifestly had for object
to banish from sight many of the miseries of life.
It is in the book entitled _The Triumph of the Lamb_ that we see best
delineated the Christ of her heart, her divine Saviour and emancipator,
shedding a radiance above the grimy factory of life. Death itself becomes
lovely, and, like a “courteous friend,” opens the gates of heaven to
well-nigh all mankind.[418]
Mankind has a right to clemency, unstinted, immeasurable; in fashioning
us of a somewhat coarse clay, Heaven did not mean to make us all unhappy.
Margaret has a horror of death.[419] But Love reassures her, helps her
to pierce the mystery. Not as an avenger, but as a lamb will Christ
render justice at the Judgment Day. Men were complaining of the facility
of indulgences; Margaret settles the question off-hand; she proposes a
general pardon.
Of mysticism, as well as of love, there were already innumerable
varieties known. Perugino, Averulino,[420] the preachers of the royalty
of Christ, St. Bernardin of Sienna, Savonarola, and many another,
carried on the great traditions of Italy. France too, though more
stubborn, had her mystics, especially at Rouen and in Picardy, where the
palinodists,[421] elects souls, magistrates, municipal counsellors, had
long been singing praise to the Virgin and reviling the body:
La chair, quoy? nourriture mortelle!
L’esprit d’amour nourrit le cueur fidèle![422]
These palinodists were men of intelligence and ardour. Asking nothing of
the clergy, whom they riddled with pungent epigrams, they had recourse to
worldly means to spread their ideas, such as competitions and dramatic
performances. They resembled the women in their excessive cult of the
intellect, their unceasing itch for writing and speaking, their taste for
mystery and incognito. It was the same in regard to their impressions:
they desired to bring into relief the true life of Christ, that is,
the mystic and inward life which they held the rude apostles to have
overmuch neglected. Assuredly theirs was a noble aim. Margaret was on
excellent terms with the palinodists. Yet the mysticism of platonism was
different, implying a much more general abstraction: it mistrusted the
senses, the material form, desirous of seeing the reality of things,
the essence of God. Among the prelates it gave rise to that exquisite
academy of devotion and prayer, the Oratory of the Divine Love, which met
at Rome in the church of SS. Silvester and Dorothea Transtevera during
the pontificate of Leo X., and which numbered among its members sixty
priests and prelates, Sadoleto being one of the chief. They gave all
their thoughts to the reformation of morals, and among them prayer rose
delicately to Heaven, like those wreaths of fire the Bible shows us on
altars pleasing to the Lord.
Feminine mysticism was broader: its aim was to develop happiness, in
other words, to lead us to the summit of an ideal world, full of love
and purity. Love, having lost the egotistic and licentious character
without which the French mind refused to understand it, having become an
aspiration for the French as well as for the idealist races, represented
the very substance of the world; it was divine and eternal; it gathered
up all things, even men, into the heart of God. The Gospel was only the
practical expression of this high natural law, of which the pagans long
ago had caught glimpses, and to which Seneca ventured darkly to allude
when he wrote, “When, tell me, will you love one another?” The Gospel
was the sum and crown of human wisdom. Hence Erasmus wished to canonise
Virgil, and to add to the Litany a new response—“St. Socrates, pray for
us.” Plato was quoted in the pulpit; Anne of France, who was orthodoxy
itself, took pains to mingle the philosophers with the Fathers. Trajan
was regarded as a model; Louis XII. and Guevara, the tutor of Charles V.,
lived on the maxims of Marcus Aurelius.
They aimed at a sort of natural mysticism, the object of which would be
to express the essence of mundane things. “It is God,” said Rivio,[423]
“who giveth to the sky its splendours, to the trees their shade, to the
cheering vines their clusters and fruit. It is He who clotheth the earth
with fruitful crops, who causeth the trees to bud and the crystal streams
to gush forth, who covereth the meadows with a carpet. Wherefore to hunt
and fish and reap, to fulfil all the conditions of life,—this is to be a
Christian.”
No one had any bent towards naturalism, or imagined that everything that
is natural should be regarded as good or beautiful; on the contrary, men
wished to elevate and improve Nature, even to excess. Your vineyard, say,
always yields bad wine; M. Zola would tell you to drink it, Rousseau to
drink water: but these folk of the Renaissance would tell you to distil
it into brandy. From Nature they wished to borrow certain quasi-mystical
powers which exist in her in force. Hence this mysticism did not, like
that of St. Theresa, lead to the deliberate rejection of all earthly
satisfactions, to the adoration of death, suffering and humiliation.
_Carpe diem_ was their motto, as it was of Horace and Lorenzo de’ Medici.
They left to Albert Dürer and other Germanic artists the monopoly of
dances of death and maidens carried off in the arms of skeletons.
“For loss of servitors we need not despair, for many others are to be
had”: so spoke the fair ladies, not out of indifference, but out of fear
lest the mournful idea should trouble their hearts: for “there is none
of us, if she regards her loss, but has occasion for deep sorrow.”[424]
When we ask history or romance or the drama to carry us for a time out of
ourselves, do not we too seek, in reality, the satisfaction of forgetting
death—perchance, of forgetting life?
That was the very human root of this mysticism. In turning back to the
page of love, no one wished to feel under the fingers the page of death.
Far from forgetting life, they affirmed it: the secret of life was life
itself. They mocked at death. A skeleton at the feast, a spectre at the
ball, were subjects for laughter. Like Boccaccio, Machiavelli sets his
gayest stories in a horrible framework of pestilence; rich folk laugh
and make love under cool leafy shades; and their excuse is that, but a
few paces off, death is grinning at them. Such is the key to this novel
mysticism. It is a tragic dance of fragilities; but the dancers see
nothing fragile. They forge for themselves an artificial weapon, they
prefer beauty to truth.
It followed from the same ideas that they held direct communion with
God. The tender worship of the Virgin, fallen a little out of use, no
longer throve except stealthily in a corner, like the beautiful plant
which the Flemish painters loved to represent in a crystal vase.[425]
Communication with heaven was opened by means of conspicuous semaphores,
though these unhappily were irregular and far apart. St. Theresa, like
a genuine freelance, might speak of storming heaven, and carrying its
successive redoubts one by one; but the philosophic idea was different—a
simple canter in a friendly country. On some beautiful day in May, when
Nature, overflowing with love, scatters her gifts in careless profusion,
a certain Knight, Beau-Doulx by name, sets off among the flowery meadows
to conquer this “noble and delectable castle of Love,” all sapphires and
emeralds from base to turret. He bears with him no cannon, no scaling
ladders. Arrived beneath the walls, he sinks on his knees and declares
his love. That is all. That is “the realm of Paradise, wherein is love
divine.”
Nature hails God in us, and reveals God to us. The song that rises
from the sea soars even to the stars; the luxuriant warmth of the air
is a symbol of mercy. Such a temple was better loved than the frantic
mysticism of certain northern cathedrals. As for the rites of this
worship, they were those of platonism. Salvatorio wrote a _Treasury
of Holy Scripture after the Poems of Petrarch_: Fra Feliciano Umbruno
offered to the ladies of Rome a _Dialogue on the sweet death of Jesus
Christ_, this too inspired by Petrarch. Fra Malipiero presented the
famous _Spiritual Petrarch_, which appeared at Venice in 1536 and ran
into the tenth edition. The spiritualisation of sonnets was effected
easily enough: but anyone who wished to amend the _canzoni_ and
miscellaneous poems had a troublesome task.
The religion of love found an incomparable interpreter in Correggio.
Correggio is _the_ painter of women. How wonderfully he translates their
dream of love and confidence, in harmony with the code of aesthetic
Christianity! In his _Saint Jerome_, the Virgin is beautiful to look
upon, of a human, piquant, smiling beauty; but the whole effect of the
picture is derived from the face of the Magdalene, and her intensely
caressing attitude: it is the apotheosis of the caress! Never, perhaps,
has love all-embracing, soft as velvet, been so warmly expressed: prayer,
passion, all is cast into the shade by this contemplation of pure love,
this contact, enchanting, radiant, of two beings united by a magnetic
tenderness. The child Jesus has behind Him an angel representing heaven;
before Him St. Jerome holds an open book; but He turns about, bestowing
His gracious smile upon the Magdalene, whom He prefers to all human
learning because she is Love.
At the Louvre, too, the _Mystic Marriage_ fills one’s heart with a
golden, sunny vision. “It is impossible,” says Vasari, “to see more
beautiful hair, lovelier hands, a more natural and charming colouring.”
In this ardent “conversation” life seems to be suspended: “The will
is changed to love, the memory appears to have vanished, and the
understanding has ceased to act.”
Devotion is often accused of being tiresome. It is true that God has
no revelation to make to Himself; He is the immortality of the known.
The women who lived on such lofty ideas readily assumed a profound and
pensive air, an expression of intelligence and trenchancy rather than
tenderness. Like the wounded soldier at Austerlitz of whom Tolstoï
speaks, they awoke in the vast silence of the night, alone with the clear
bright stars.
Where men would have brought their pride, women brought their sweetness.
Their language was a little involved and “precious.”
Yet we can see from the correspondence of Margaret of France and Vittoria
Colonna, how sincerely they thought themselves happy. These two ladies
never saw each other. Vittoria writes that while awaiting the infinite
happiness of a meeting, she ventures to reply to the “high and religious”
words of the princess, so as to act as balance-weight to that celestial
timepiece. “In our day, the long and difficult journey of life compels
us to have a guide; it seems to me that everyone can find in his own sex
the most appropriate models.... I turned towards the illustrious ladies
of Italy to find examples for imitation, and though I saw many virtuous
among them ... yet one woman alone, and she not in Italy, seemed to me
to unite the perfections of the will with those of the intellect; but
she was so high placed and so far away that my heart was filled with the
gloom and fear of the Hebrews when they perceived the fire and glory
of God on the mountain-top, and durst not draw near because of their
imperfection.”
In this first letter the marchioness contents herself with glorifying the
humility and charitableness of her noble correspondent, whose daughter
she humbly calls herself, or better, her John Baptist, her Forerunner:
these personal compliments always play an important part in feminine
diplomacy, full of splendid courtesy. She speaks of her group of friends;
she often enjoys, she adds, the conversation of Pole, who “is always in
the heavens, and only descends to earth to do service to others,” and
that of Bembo, one of the labourers of the eleventh hour, perhaps, but
eminently worthy, by reason of his ardour, of the wages of the first; and
all these friends of hers unite in contemplating from afar this queen of
gems, so rich in radiance that she enriches others.
In another letter Vittoria grapples more closely with the burning
questions of the day. She affirms her respect for reason, but she prefers
religion, “the supreme perfection of our soul,” the perfect beauty. For
the better unfolding of her theme she encloses a copy of her sonnets.
This copy, though addressed to the sister of the king, was intercepted
in the post by order of the Constable de Montmorency. Whether he read
the sonnets or not is very doubtful; in any case he judged them to be
pernicious stuff, and seized the opportunity of indulging in the luxury
of an explosion. He only gave up the book after a stormy scene at the
king’s table.
Vergerio,[426] the amiable prelate who was the pope’s nuncio in France,
had great difficulty also in meeting Margaret. How ample was his reward
when he succeeded! His first audience, which lasted not less than four
hours, seemed to him far too short to satisfy his “spiritual enthusiasm.”
He lost not a moment in committing to paper all that had been said, in
order to show to what altitudes of Grace and divine Love “mounts the
spirit of the queen.” But how was it possible to transfer to paper so
much spontaneous eloquence, so much fervour, so potent a charm?... It was
not a very comfortable conversation. Margaret could speak no language
but French, and as Vergerio was hardly at home in it, she spelt out her
words, so to speak, mingling with them as much Latin and Italian as she
could. For all this, when Vergerio took his leave, in his ravishment he
fancied he saw the glaciers of the human heart melting under the hot
beams of faith, and breathed the wonderful breath of God. Whence came
this miracle? “Praise be to Jesus Christ, who in our troublous times
hath raised up such intelligences—here the queen of Navarre, of whom I
speak; at Ferrara the lady Renée of France; at Urbino the lady Leonora
Gonzaga,[427] both of whom I have seen here, with whom I conversed for
several hours, and who seemed to me endowed with eminently lofty minds,
filled with charity, all on fire with Christ; at Rome the lady Vittoria
Colonna—to speak of none but your own sex.” And he repeats that the
thorns in the Saviour’s vine are fast disappearing; thanks to women, he
sees the radiance of light and peace.
Vergerio continued to converse with the queen of Navarre with
ever-renewed joy. One is almost ashamed to transcribe with a cold pen
phrases so ardently trustful and palpitating: “I have in sooth no greater
wealth, no greater consolation than this queen; she has words of infinite
warmth, and marvellous means for uplifting to the service of God hearts
that are cold and dead. It happens that for eighteen days I did not
appear at court, but dwelt in sweet retirement, busy cultivating my soul
and sowing within myself the word of God. Then went I where the queen’s
glowing charity was found, and I felt that she caused the seed to spring
up and wax strong and bring forth fruit, in other words the knowledge of
God and the fervent desire to serve Him, and Him alone.”
Such were these lofty spirits, so enthusiastic for the beautiful. They
lived on poetry in a sphere apart, cheering one another, mutually calmed
and comforted; it was after her interviews with Vergerio that Margaret
declared herself a platonist and shook off the yoke of the court. No one
hoped, of course, that the whole world would chime in tune; they well
knew that when these abstractions filtered down to the mob they would
become materialised, and love itself would ofttimes become tainted.
But was it not a beautiful thing to sow love broadcast with no hope of
reaping, and to go forth like angels of God to pour a little dew on the
parched ground?
This was not destined to prevent the wars and massacres of the 16th
century; but a glance at the map will show that Catholicism triumphed
in the countries where women triumphed; fog and beer and men turned
Protestant.
Further, these ideas, crushed as people fancied them, reappeared by
degrees everywhere, as from the effect of a resistless germination. From
them sprang the 18th century; with them our own age also, for all its
matter-of-fact bent, is still entirely impregnated.
And Sadoleto the friend of Melanchthon, the liberal-minded Contarini,
the amiable Reginald Pole so much influenced by Vittoria Colonna,
Flaminio,[428] Vergerio, would all smile at certain reconciliatory
schemes of to-day.
CHAPTER VI
RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE (_Continued_)
“I would a thousand times rather believe in and pursue an ideal, even
though too high, than miss or betray it,” said Montalembert. Many persons
in the 16th century were of a different opinion. They deemed aesthetic
religion too frivolous or too worldly a thing, above all, too chimerical.
The adversaries of the religion of beauty split up into two categories:
some opposed it from reasoned conviction, others from social jealousy and
incompatibility of temper.
The first, of whom Alberto Pio[429] and Budé,[430] eminent and estimable
men, may serve as specimens, scouted the very idea of any connection
between philosophy and religion, between aesthetics and morals; in their
opinion religion did not tend to satisfy the reason, nor beauty to purify
the conduct. The suggested reconciliation was to them an ill-disguised
reversion to paganism, and in practice led to scandals like the
representation of Machiavelli’s _Mandragora_[431] at the Vatican.
As we have seen, persons of this same opinion had already demonstrated
the irrationality and inadequacy of reasoning; they had thereby relieved
the world of a serious embarrassment; sensibility was henceforth to be
the sole guide of life. But now we find others wishing to destroy this
sensibility also, and to strip us of everything. At the idea that love is
born of beauty such people veil their faces, and beg us to take away this
thing they cannot bear to look upon, that is neither moral nor religious!
Assuredly it is impossible to commend everything in the Roman movement.
Far from it! There is only too large a scope for criticism. Aestheticism
was carried too far: it was, for example, a singularly wild notion to
consider the building of St. Peter’s at Rome a social necessity of the
first importance, and to sacrifice a part of the Catholic world to the
desire of completing the Vatican. Antiquity, to be sure, evoked a quite
exclusive enthusiasm, and it was singular to see the headquarters of
Christianity going crazy about Pomponius Laetus, calling him “the glory
of the age,” “Caesar,” because he was unearthing pagan catacombs. Not
that mythology, as then cultivated, aimed at bringing back a real,
lively faith in the Olympian deities! Isis, Apollo, Venus, on the walls
of the Vatican or the churches, stood only for symbols and types of
philosophy: Jean Bouchet very happily styled them “the aristocracy of
the world.” Men thought, with Plato, that the beauty of things can only
be gauged by comparing them with an eternal type; as Margaret of France
said: “The Beautiful is seen in all forms of beauty.” Further, morality,
without divorcing itself officially from Christianity, sometimes was
pretty completely disjoined from it; to many people virtue consisted in
wearing a good coat and keeping up a good style. Montaigne, Aretino, and
Benvenuto Cellini, for example, passed for virtuous men.
To protest against this paganism was a right and proper thing. But was
it necessary to forbid Christianity to secure a rational appreciation,
and even to win our love by working upon our emotions? An ineradicable
instinct prompted the Latin races to believe through love; “Italy will be
un-christianised, not Calvinised,” as Azeglio admirably said. To invest
worship with mundane pomp and circumstance is as profoundly human an idea
as it is to keep the clock at a railway station a few minutes behind time.
The Middle Ages, however, kept strict time: materialistic as they
were, they erected cathedrals, the baser instincts avenging themselves
by affixing to the cornices, or even to the porches, in full view,
ornamental details cynically human. The Renaissance, for all its
mysticism, was not partial to the dim religious light, or the mysteries
shadowed in lofty arches far out of eyeshot; it loved clearness,
daylight, illumination. It built only châteaux, even to the glory of God.
St. Peter’s at Rome is a château; the eye detects nothing abnormal in it;
and there man feels himself at home.
It was thus with the religion of prelates and women. It was lofty,
sometimes loftier than Gothic arches, but so broad, so clear, so full of
unity, of so human a hospitality that no one felt he had to do with the
unknown, the unfathomable. It was a reflection of life itself, but with
added brilliance and decoration; it aimed at attracting man, when he had
performed his material functions in eating, drinking, loving his wife,
to a banquet of spiritual fare and spiritual love. We look to women to
quicken our perception. In spiritual concerns the parts are reversed.
Now, men spent their lives in an atmosphere of materialism and unbridled
sensuality. Melin de Saint-Gelais declared nudities “heavenly objects,
worthy of altars.”[432] Coyness was unknown. “Happy the people who have
only God to deal with,” cries a young lady: “with men it is enough to
save appearances.”[433] In the view of many, morality found only an
insufficient sanction in religion; the third Margaret of France wrote,
with a modesty unhappily too well justified: “Some consider that God
holds the great in his special protection.” And on the other hand, the
laws of society did not always oppose a very solid barrier: it was easy
to a noble lady to override them. Renée of France took a manifest
pleasure in running atilt against popular conventions; Marot had only to
set the mob against him as “a lascivious pagan,” to merit her indulgence.
Apparently she was even tempted to believe a daughter of France so
superior to humanity at large that she could have only lovers.
However, it was sincerely believed that, for people of refinement and
distinction, good style and good taste rendered many artistic things
inoffensive. So (to select one example among a thousand) no one was
shocked when the Abbé de Maupas gave his approval to some neat verses in
which Gilles d’Aurigny boasted his conquest of a “sweet pale Margaret.”
The gentle spotless Vergerio very gaily accepted the title of “bishop
of Aretino.” Margaret compliments her brother on retaining his faith
through all his sin. Does she praise the sin? Not at all: but she praises
the king for what is praiseworthy, the remaining a Christian. Vergerio
would have shrunk with horror from certain of Aretino’s books, but he
considered the man as a force, of as much importance as any diocese,
while many of the episcopal boroughs contained as many vices with less
wit. And he tries to coax some good thing out of this diocese. On the
same principle Margaret set Vauzelles to translate some of Aretino’s
devotional works. Indulgence thus shown in practice had no modifying
effect on principles, and besides, men were particularly careful not to
extend it to the masses. Among them, as everybody knows, there is no such
thing as sentiment, but only sensations, and with them, consequently, the
fetters of a material morality were still found serviceable. The same
Caterina Cibo who highly approved Firenzuola’s book on love, severely
reproached the bishop of Camerino for his slackness in reforming the
morals of his clergy, and succeeded in obtaining from the pope a rigorous
brief on the subject.
In society it happened that pagan sensation and Christian sentiment
all but touched; it seemed prudent, advantageous, and politic not to
accentuate the difference between them. Many people, like true gourmets,
let themselves swing gently between mysticism and materialism; perhaps
it was just as well not to compel them to decide one way or the other.
It has been well said that “faith has this peculiarity, that when it has
vanished, it influences still: grace survives by force of habit from
a once living sentiment.”[434] The logical Germans proceeded to deduce
from this spiritual condition the system of “faith without works.” But
folk remained satisfied with “confidence without works.” It was in these
practical considerations that an answer was found to Budé’s objections.
However, Budé was a friend, and sought only to point out abuses. The real
and invincible adversaries of the religion of beauty, those who hoped
to destroy it, came from below. They were such as society scouted—the
vulgar, the superstitious, the material-minded, the street as against
the salon: in short, the men. When Vergerio went to Germany to discourse
of love, he was answered in a strain that disconcerted him: the Germans
talked politics to him. “I am tortured,” he cries, “to see the cause of
Jesus Christ treated with so much indignity; it appears to me that to-day
this is not the real explanation of the immense trouble taken with so
many people: it is assuredly only a pretext. The main thing considered
under the cloak of zeal for Christ is, I believe, nothing but the private
interests of a few individuals.”
The clergy did not follow the religious lead of the prelates. The whole
of the middle or lower orders among them, the country parsons, the monks,
made common cause, some in a materialist direction,[435] others as
visionaries, against the philosophic group, the higher prelacy, and the
priesthood of women.
The monk was a man of different stamp. Margaret petting Rabelais
resembles, if we may be allowed the expression, a hen mothering a duck.
Look at the man of fustian, whom one pious author liked to call “God’s
nightingale,” there in his pulpit, fist on hip, vulgar, impassioned,
ranting, preaching terrible doctrines with sonorous voice. The antagonism
between him and the platonist women is easily realised. He did not
bother his head about beauty or love; instead of an amiable liberality
which would suit a sceptical audience, it seemed as though with his
wild declamations he had no other aim than to quench the embers still
smouldering. It was more than a treason, it was a folly. He did not mince
matters; he reviled the bishops and great ones of the earth; talk to
him of love, he replied with retribution, toil, eternal torments, the
glories of poverty, the agonies of the animal man. Savonarola himself,
so warm and passionate, so much loved and worthy of love, brandished
with scriptural fervour the great popular weapons, the prophecies and
the wrath to come. In France, Oliver Maillard, Ménot, Rabelais himself
(though misguided) possessed a breezy eloquence, rugged, turbid,
picturesque, censorious, verbose, nowhit metaphysical, the opposite of
the official Ciceronianism:
Il presche en théologien;
Mais pour boire de belle eau claire,
Faites-la boire à vostre chien,
Frère Lubin ne le peult faire.[436]
Maillard went so far as to sing songs of his own in the pulpit! Others
indulged in wearisome or tasteless jests, in the most aristocratic of
churches,[437] and before a queen.
Ignorant of the world and its refinements, the monks and parsons applied
to distinguished consciences the casuistry of the suburbs: their morality
smacked of the natural man. It proscribed refined joys: a man should
be “an ox or an ass,” as Savonarola said. Not that the monks were
ill-natured: they were hospitable; they would console an unhappy wife;
they would assist a widow to find a gem of a son-in-law. But there their
understanding of the feminine nature stopped. For the rest they saw in
women only Satanic lures, false chignons, perfumes, all the fripperies
of which Savonarola had made so magnificent a holocaust in the great
square of Florence! Amiability was quite beyond them. Fra Inigo, in one
of the streets of Toledo, happened to be walking behind some ladies whose
trains were raising clouds of dust. They good-naturedly stopped to let
him pass. Fancying he was the very pink of courtesy he said: “I kiss your
hands, ladies; proceed, I beg you: the dust raised by the sheep doesn’t
annoy the wolf.” In the pulpit it was the same; if they spoke of social
necessities, it was like the peasants they were; they preached poverty
and chastity without qualification; they had no eye for fine shades, but
bedaubed the most delicate façades with their garish colours. “Are you
in fit state to die? You women who display your beautiful bosoms, your
necks, your throats, would you wish to die in your present condition? And
you priests, would you like to die with your conscience burdened with the
masses you have said? Not four out of a thousand, I believe, would be
found ready. If the last trump here assailed our ears, we should then see
who would respond to its appeal!”[438]
The monastic spirit was indestructible; Spagnuoli[439] and Du Four
carried it into the courts. Adrian VI., coming between two Medicean
popes, cherished this spirit at the Vatican.[440] During three reigns
Francis de Paul remained faithful to it at the court of France. Once
before, as he passed through Rome, St. Francis had ventured to upbraid
a cardinal lolling in a sumptuous equipage, and the prelate, bending
forward over the door, had replied with a fine and courtly smile that
it was very necessary to inspire the children of that generation with
respect. How much St. Francis was idolised by the ladies it is beyond us
to tell: in all circumstances of gravity they claimed his intercession,
and yet he did not flatter them. He would never give audience to them.
Women and wealth, said he, are the two scourges of the Church—and
especially devout women: them he called “vipers.”
How the world flung back these invectives! Ladies and prelates vied
with one another in mocking at the lower monastic orders—those shaven
scurvy bald-pates who stood in the way of all spiritual regeneration;
ill-bred, material-minded fellows, uneducated, coarse, fat, full-blooded,
brimming over with a hot, carnal vitality, gay to the core and therefore
prompt to sin, much “more attentive to the life active than to the life
contemplative”—those easy-going vagabonds who, awaiting eternity, “do
not weary their minds overmuch by perusal of a heap of books,” for fear
lest the lore they might imbibe from them should puff them out with
pride, like Lucifer, and “make them decline from monastic learning.” The
pallid platonists, “crushed under their trappings,” called them fanatics,
hypocrites, misers, gluttons, and above all filthy and disgusting
wretches. It was a singular idea the Prince da Carpi had—to be buried in
a monk’s fustian frock, and thus “turn monk beyond the tomb.” That was
clean contrary to the mode!
Margaret lampooned the monks. Alexander VI. called them tyrants, and
declared he would much rather offend the greatest of kings than the least
of these mendicants. At a carnival at Rome, Bibbiena, galloping along
under his mask, caught sight of a monk, and swooped down on him like a
hawk upon its prey. “I know you,” he cries tragically: “the provost is
after you to arrest you, but I will save you; I will carry you off to the
chancellor’s”; and thereupon he grabs the unlucky monk, hoists him on to
the crupper all shivering and shaking, and off they go amid the hoots and
yells and gibes of the mob, under a shower of eggs! Soon Bibbiena was
yolk of egg from head to heel,—and was privately accusing the people of
uncommonly bad marksmanship. At last, when the city had had its fill of
laughter, he deigned to yield to the supplications of his victim and set
him down. Then the other broke a few more eggs over him, flung off his
frock, and with a low bow said, “I am your groom.” Bibbiena galloped on.
We need not, of course, take literally the jests of that period against
the monks. There were good and bad monks; the good were those least
in evidence. But Guy Juvenal, who was an active and honest worker for
monastic reform, winds up his enquiry[441] with a phrase as old as St.
Augustine: “You find in the convents the best and the worst.”
However, the adversaries of the monks do them justice themselves,
unintentionally. The company in the _Heptameron_, for instance, are much
amused at the idea that some monks may possibly have overheard their
ribald talk. One of the Urbino coterie traces a portrait of the monks
from the outside which leaves us musing. Gross and plump, he says, they
were hypocrites: little mortification of the flesh there! Emaciated and
unkempt, they were false hounds who distinguished between sins secret
and sins open. Elegant, well-trimmed, scented—these were everything that
was vilest and most antagonistic to platonism! But what then ought their
style to have been?
Trithemius, however, defined the monastic life in a highly platonist
phrase: “To love is to know.” How came, then, the idea that monks could
not actively mingle in the life of the world, since St. Ignatius proved
the contrary when he founded an order in harmony with the new spirit?
The convents of old were peopled with distinguished intellects; Luther,
Calvin, Erasmus, Jean Thenaud, André Thevet,[442] and a thousand others
sprang from these decried lower clergy. How can we believe that the
monks were by their tenets at odds with aestheticism, when the Italian
Dominicans monopolised the charming art of mosaic in wood and almost
monopolised also that of painting on glass—when St. Mark’s at Florence,
impregnated with the fragrant inspirations of the Fra Angelicos and the
Fra Bartolomeos, stands forth to this day, in the profound simplicity of
neglect, one of the most delightful refuges of human thought?
Certain of the more cultured orders had a bent for learning. And these
were expelled; the Jacobins were harried away by the cardinal of Amboise
because they lived outside their convent walls in order to dance
attendance at court, and neglected the offices of the church. There was
a striking repetition of this quarrel in the 17th century, between Dom
Mabillon, who advocated a learned monkhood, and the fiery abbé of Rancé,
who wished to maintain the monasteries in the simple practice of piety;
and in this contest also a woman (the duchess of Guise) took part.
Yet many of the monks, from a godly desire for success, strove earnestly
to suit themselves to the fashion; they freely cited the Olympian deities
and quoted Ovid and Virgil; in spite of the counsels of Savonarola, they
exerted themselves to please, even though at the expense of “the divine.”
One preacher draws an ingenious parallel between the Virgin and Isis.
Others discourse on beauty or coquetry, its benefits and perils. Some
maintain that the Virgin was not pretty, because she was lowly and not
in society; others, on the contrary, nourished on the _Song of Songs_
and other aesthetic authorities, depict her as “clothed with the sun”
according to the phrase in the Apocalypse—dark-skinned perhaps, being a
Jewess, but a woman to be admired nevertheless!
But the monks, do what they might, scatter a thousand flowers of
mythology and rhetoric as they pleased, never acquired the lightness of
touch the least of the sonneteers possessed.
Rabelais opens with a polemic on the merit of women, a stale subject, but
impossible to avoid. He loves the world and mocks at the “molish monk”;
he extols, on the other hand, the monk “young, gallant, dexterous, bold,
adventurous, resolute, tall, lean, voluminous in chaps, well-favoured
in nose, who smartly patters his prayers and polishes off his masses
... moreover, a clerk to the finger-tips in point of the breviary.” He
admits both sexes to his abbey of Thelema, on proof of perfect beauty.
It is laved and perfumed, this modern abbey—full of gold and jewels, of
beauteous garments, of music, of things sumptuous and comfortable, of
books: nothing is wanting there: it has nine thousand three hundred and
thirty-two chapels, and a single swimming bath under the watchful eye of
a statue of the Three Graces. No one there is irked by theology!
And yet Rabelais was absolutely at sea in regard to the platonist
spirit, to these mystic abstractions: “To have a woman is to have her
for the use wherefor Nature created her ... for the delectation of man.”
If anyone speaks to him of the “devotion of love” he laughs and sets
himself down at the table: “Drink,” cries the Sibyl in his ear, “drink!”
Drunkenness—that is mysticism enough for him! He leaves the convent to
become a physician. He commends none but the natural sciences, and the
only one he cannot away with is the only one that women accept—prophetic
astrology. He was bound to end as a parson!
Even in Italy, the monk always smacked of his convent. Folengo[443]
spent his life in going in and out of it. His works also are nothing
but one everlasting buffoonery. In his _Moscheid_, he appears to depict
the conspiracy of monks against fine ladies—an epic complot of all
creeping things—ants, bugs, spiders—against the winged race of bees and
butterflies. The royal head of the chancellery, Spingard, sets off on a
lean-ribbed mare, bearing splendid letters under the great seal of the
Senate (an image of Liberty and Justice), in order to entice men into a
spider’s web.
But the Italian monks accepted their rout; they derided the antiquated
“subtleties of St. Thomas,” as well as visions of God without
intermediaries, and hatred of indulgences. Their solace was a splendid
ignorance, Neapolitan, epicurean.
In Germany, on the contrary, they triumphed. Despite the recommendations
of Leo X. and the passionate objurgations of Erasmus, the Germans refused
to admire the works of the hour, the _Epistles_ of Eoban,[444] for
instance, in which the holy women of the New Testament are represented
as writing in the style of Ovid. They waged implacable war against
aestheticism and dilettantism, and the bitterness of the struggle was
only accentuated every time they came in contact with Rome. Burckhardt,
writing his memoirs day by day about a splendid epoch, is incessantly
bemoaning its corruption: does he perceive the existence of a spiritual
movement at Rome? He sees nothing of liberty but the scandals; he does
his duty like a painstaking but muddle-headed corporal. Erasmus himself
is blind to all but the humanities, while Luther finds only horrors.
They spoke with different tongues. When Hoogstratten, a German monk,
impeached Reuchlin, who had ventured to defend certain Jewish books on
scientific grounds, Rome was utterly unable to make out the bearings of
this Teutonic quarrel: she procrastinated, and let the matter drop.
Ulrich von Hütten tried to Italianise himself at the little court of the
archbishop of Mayence, which claimed to be a copy of Urbino, but all they
did there was to play billiards and abuse the monks behind their backs.
He returned to Rome in 1516, one of the years of triumph; and there, son
of a sturdy and poor country where the lord ruled and even robbed people
at his pleasure, and where woman was emphatically the weaker vessel, he,
the old and unknown student, found himself excluded from that superb
court,[445] from those “false gods” as he called them, and relegated to
the society of a German financier of low degree; he had no recommendation
but his birth; and he could barely succeed in finishing his studies in
law. He took his revenge in abuse. “I have human feelings,” he wrote to
Luther.
With lofty eloquence and burning zeal he preached the necessary war.
The apostles of love had called war a brigandage. Hütten denounced as
brigands the non-combatants—merchants, advocates, and priests. His motto
was: a beautiful woman, gold, and indolence. In 1522 he took up arms, and
with a magnificent gesture pointed out the splendid churches to the mob.
Luther, too, protests against the philosophic spirit. He checks liberty
at a certain point, forbidding the mind to emancipate itself further.
From a thinker he becomes a man of action, and joins hands with the great
lords.
There was an explosion of anti-feminist and anti-liberal sentiments—war
to the knife. It took place, like all great moral outbursts, under the
banner of religion, because religion possessed organised battalions, a
force ready at call, and, above all, excellent pretexts with which to
veil struggles entered into on behalf of selfish interests.
“Talk of household concerns is women’s affair,” said Luther: “they are
mistresses and queens there, and more than a match for Cicero and the
finest orators.... But take them from their housewifery and they are good
for nothing.... Woman is born to manage a household: ’tis her lot, her
law of nature: man is born for war and polity, to administer and govern
states.” As a model for the sculptor woman delighted Luther; but that
was all; he denied her physical and moral vigour; the less her moral
strength, the more he congratulates her. Evidently the intellectual
pretensions of feminism constituted in his eyes an absurdity and a peril.
Calvin went still farther. Whatever was pleasing to women he proscribed,
even aesthetic emotions however inoffensive, however religious in
character. He would hardly deign to believe that women are really good
hands at puddings! Some ladies, in their noble devotion to his cause,
had found a common prison in the Châtelet; he sent them somewhat grim
felicitations. “If men are frail and easily shaken, the frailty of your
sex is still greater.... God hath chosen the foolish things of the world
to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the
things which are mighty, and base things of the world, and things which
are despised, to bring to nought those that are great and of high worth.”
There was nothing for Luther to invent. Everyone desired a reformation,
like himself. The cardinal of Amboise and the traditional school wished
to try back and restore discipline; the philosophic women and the Roman
world were for pushing ahead, and saw salvation in the rejuvenescence of
faith through liberty.[446] But neither party was eager for a schism,
above all the Liberals of Rome, who not only stood for unity, which was
their breath of life, but also gladly washed their hands of pure theology.
Luther invented nothing. All that he said, and even more, had been said
at Rome for fifty years before him. He caught certain floating ideas, and
fixed those which had passed into current morality. This was to attack
dilettantism. The gentle feminist and Latinist prelates, with their
tolerance, their openness of mind and intellectual freedom—Sadoleto,
the friend of Melanchthon, Contarini, Pole, the kindly scholar ruled
by Vittoria Colonna, Flaminio, Vergerio—all deplored the degradation
of their handiwork: they felt as a Raphaelite painter would feel if he
found his dreams copied in a picture by Espinal. Yet, while lamenting
this use made of liberty, they respected it; at bottom they considered
Zwingle and Melanchthon as two of themselves, and they did not despair of
achieving the triumph of freedom by freedom itself. Such was, as we know,
the policy of Pole at Ratisbon, and of Vergerio at Worms; but despite
the support of Vittoria Colonna, Margaret of France, and a whole band of
enthusiastic and ardent women, they did not succeed; they were caught
between two fires.
Women threw themselves into the fray with enthusiasm.
We might fancy ourselves looking at the Sabine women of David’s famous
picture: daughters of the Roman Church, very devoted, very judicious (at
least in their own opinion), and yet ready in the name of freedom to
defend and love their adversaries.
Vittoria Colonna always believed herself as orthodox as the Holy See
itself, and more clever, even when in the heat of the battle she put
forth opinions somewhat questionable.
She sang the barque of Peter triumphing over all the billows of the
world’s vileness and ill-will, and she received the papal benediction.
But yet, in the great religious struggle of the 16th century, she could
never realise that genuine difficulties of doctrine were involved; she
saw nothing but a medley of personal intrigues, rivalries, jealousies,
offended susceptibilities, good intentions bungled; excellent judges
have shared her impressions. Entirely new circumstances had to arise,
the fiercest moment of the battle had to come, before the court of Rome
at last repudiated retrospectively all fellowship with Vittoria. And yet
events seemed to justify the thesis of love—a thesis neither Protestant
nor strictly Catholic.
Attached to a religion of intuition and sentiment, the women aimed at
saving the guilty by the love of the innocent; they put into practice a
doctrine rather divine than religious; their scheme was that of Henri
IV.: “Those who unswervingly follow their conscience are of my religion,
and I am of the religion of all who are brave and good.”
Vittoria Colonna took a very special interest in a celebrated Capuchin,
the ardent and eloquent Ochino, who had formed at Naples a sort of
liberal triumvirate. Somewhat intoxicated with his popularity and the
warm sympathies of the feminist group, Ochino bitterly attacked Paul III.
about certain measures of reform directed against the Capuchins. The
marchioness hastened to prevent a rupture; she issued a great liberal
manifesto addressed to Contarini, and at the same time urged Ochino
to come to Rome. Paul smiled at the manifesto, and sent the author a
pilgrim’s passport, for herself and a Capuchin. Ochino, however, made
a rancorous reply. Women put forth indescribable efforts to bring back
to the fold this sheep who was threatening to wander away! Thanks to
the feminine freemasonry, Ochino, though openly at odds with the pope,
still occupied with brilliance the principal pulpits of Verona, Venice,
Bologna and Mantua, until at last he took to flight. Vittoria never lost
sight of him; at Venice, she got secret information as to his welfare
from Bembo, who had just been raised to the cardinalate.[447] Later, by
means of anonymous letters in which she told her old protégé that she
was buying his books and getting insight into his views, flattering him,
calling herself his “very obedient daughter and disciple,” she did her
utmost to bring him to reason. Vain illusion! Ochino was a monk, Vittoria
a noble lady; they belonged to two jarring worlds.
Margaret of France wished to play the same part, but she found herself in
a more embarrassing situation, and understood still less, if possible,
the real bearing of the struggle. She dreamed of reforming humanity, not
dogmas; she left to God the task of winning the victory and causing the
“word of truth” to shine forth. Why limit the range of these dreams? “The
Church is a living and active voice, which is its own explanation, and
can always express itself anew and more abundantly.” Why this procreation
of rigorous dogmas, to the ruin of the feminine apostleship? Margaret
pressed towards synthesis; she wished to know, to co-ordinate, to
succeed. Briçonnet wrote to her smilingly: “If there were at the end of
the earth a learned doctor who, by means of a single compendium, could
teach the whole art of grammar, besides rhetoric, philosophy and the
seven liberal arts, you would rush to him as a cold man rushes to the
fire.”
Where then was she to seek the illumination of love and faith if not
in that religious philosophy towards which she had always inclined? In
regard to faith, still more than in social matters, she felt how good it
was to soar into the heights of abstraction, to go direct to the verities
without troubling about men. How cramping it would have seemed to her to
embody all theology and all faith, both Paradise and Hell, in one man,
in one priest! She smiled on men, provided they were men of good-will,
even if they burnt others, as Francis I. did, but still more if they were
burnt or in danger of burning, like “that poor Berquin,” or the chaplain
Michel, or the canons of Bourges, or Farel, Vatable, Gerard Roussel.[448]
A man might translate the Thomist work the _Mirror of Ladies_; might
call himself Lefèvre d’Etaples, _faber ingeniorum_, or Dolet; might be
a witty libertine like Pocques or Duval—no matter, he had claims on her
affection, if he was well disposed. She delighted in hearing Erasmus and
Luther discuss the question of free-will. She looked on at these passages
at arms with the same satisfaction as others witnessed a tourney. In
concert with a lady of influence, she dragged the king to St. Eustace, to
hear a sermon by a whirlwind of a parson who preached peace and _sursum
corda_. She was anxious to arrange at Paris a controversial meeting
with Melanchthon, but the Faculty of Theology was not agreeable. The
theologian really after her own heart was the amiable prelate Nicolas
Dangu, who followed her everywhere like a perfect lover.
There was yet another man able to please her; a sort of magian,
remarkable in spite of his wild notions, who carried feminine theology to
the pitch of absurdity. This was Guillaume Postel, a workhouse foundling,
a nobody, a village brat and then a lackey, half oriental, half Italian,
though a Frenchman: a man of eminent learning and enlightened mind,
the fine essence of eclecticism. He wrote in twelve languages on the
most various subjects, in support of the most diversified theses. He
advocated a universal monarchy which he offered to Francis I., and a
universal religion, genuinely catholic and Roman, the papacy of which he
reserved for himself. He based it upon the doctrine of infinite love (if
need be, a somewhat sensual love), and upon an aesthetic philosophy which
should solve all mysteries by applying the formula of the Beautiful.
According to this religion, it was for women to regenerate the world;
wherefore he salutes with ardent sympathy the Mothers of the Church whom
he sees budding forth almost everywhere—More’s daughters in England;
Isabella Rosera in Spain; in Portugal Loysa Sygea who at the age of
twenty-two honoured Pope Paul III. with her advice in five little-known
languages. Paul replied in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but excused himself
in regard to Chaldean and Arabic, and instructed Postel to take the pen.
Postel’s strange work[449] appeared after the death of Margaret of
France, under the auspices of Margaret of Savoy. Postel announced the
discovery of a new Eve, whom he extolled above all other women, even
above Vittoria Colonna. She was an aged sorceress of Venice, endowed with
second sight, who read through paper as if she had the Röntgen rays at
her disposal. Unhappily the Venetians sent her about her business.
To sum up, the women believed and maintained that, in dealing with the
people, the only language they understood must be employed—that of force;
but that for the elect there was only one real weapon—the matchless
one, liberty. The first of liberties is that of talking nonsense. It
was needful, then, to be able to tolerate freedom in others, one’s own
friends included.
The practical result of women’s intervention was in France insignificant
enough.
The long-standing hostility of the French clergy to the court of Rome had
burst out so glaringly in the reign of Louis XII., it displayed itself
so vigorously in the more or less official dithyrambs of Andrelini,
Villebresme, De Mailly, Gringoire, Jean d’Auton, Seyssel, against the
“Roman profligacy,” that Leo X. became alarmed and very prudently
abandoned in 1515 the real bone of contention, the right to dispose of
benefices. From that moment the Church, fused with the State, became a
national machine, and no philosophic argument could in future shake an
organisation so solid. Luther gave wide application to the same system
in secularising the property of the clergy. The ruck of men left the
business of dealing with these religious questions to the higher powers;
they held to their creed either out of a taste for ignorance or from
scepticism; the learned were quite content to smile and call theology
a “poesy”—like vine-growers who sell a certain doctored wine, but keep
the genuine locked up in their cellars—the wine they alone are sure of
because they cut the grapes.
Liberalism was supported, then, by only a few timid and affectionate
voices, like that of Longueil, the friend of Bembo and Pole, who said in
his _Letter to the Lutherans_: “I take no side in the struggle: a simple
citizen of the Christian republic, neither gratitude, nor hate, nor
ambition impels me to one side or the other.” Unhappily, it is not with
lofty language like this that you can rouse a mob!
Is it necessary to recall what followed? It was at all points the reverse
of what the feminists had hoped. “Our adversaries say of us,” wrote
Calvin, “that we have begun a sort of Trojan war, on account of women,
_mulierum causa_.” And in truth, as in the wars of the past, women had
again become to a certain extent the gage of battle. Religion declared
war on platonism, just as platonism had declared war on religious
virginity; instead of draping women in inaccessibility, people contented
themselves with making matrimony easier. That was a simple solution of
the difficulty. And yet it took longer than might be supposed to get
back to this solid ground of matter-of-fact. The first woman espoused by
an Archbishop of Canterbury was obliged, it appears, to travel like an
animal in a chest pierced with holes, so as to escape the buffooneries of
the mob; the second went to court; but when Queen Elizabeth saw her she
bit her lips: “What am I to call you? Madam I cannot, and Mistress I dare
not.”
Catholicism, roused to action, henceforth asked for nothing except to
condemn. It was a sudden drop from the ideal back again to earth, a
dreadful battle of personalities, a life and death struggle with mythical
or literal methods of exegesis for weapons. Erasmus was already writing:
“These interpreters of the language of Heaven go off like gunpowder,
they frown most terribly. What is Hütten to me? Shall I prefer the
authority of Luther to that of the pope? If we had not received a pope
from Christ, we should have to invent one.” “They scream and scuffle and
insult one another,” sneers Des Périers, who no longer believed even in
the existence of God. Blessed are the poor in spirit, concludes Agrippa;
blessed are illiterate people like the apostles; blessed is the ass!
CONCLUSION
Nothing now remains but to relate the conclusion of the dream.
A dream indeed—all these schemes of happiness which had flashed across
the gloomy background of realities like dissolving views on the wall of a
lecture-room: the blue sea, the blazing sun, appearing but for a moment,
left the blackness deeper still.
Margaret, the great organiser of happiness, never found the secret of
happiness for herself. Her last days were vexed with the most poignant
sorrows: the court, Calvin, the people, well-nigh the whole world, cast
her off and treated her as a Utopian dreamer: her husband went the
length of striking her, her daughter was torn from her, and Henri II.
sent her into exile; several of her friends, such as Ramus and Dolet,
were persecuted, alas! from motives far from sincere: it was, in truth,
what she called “the suburbs of death.” By divine mercy her heart,
incessantly a prey to anxieties, at length parted company with a life
that was anything but love. She perished, poor duchess, at her post as
charitable vendor of love—perished in flames, like the salamander! No
man came to her aid, none even paused to mourn her. Three young English
maidens named Seymour erected to her a frail monument of verse under the
auspices of her niece; but save for one devoted friend, Sainte-Marthe,
whose enthusiastic funeral oration nevertheless provoked the liveliest
criticisms, men maintained a remarkable silence. The princess had greatly
erred in scattering her affections and seeking to create a sociology of
the heart. Men do not care for love, they wish to fear and obey! There is
no true love but the love of an individual.
The Saint-Gelais, the Héroëts, the Salels, all those exquisite hearts
bubbling over with sentiment when a smile from Margaret could lead them
to fortune, now remained mute; the drum had to be set a-beating, and
then at length there appeared a volume of elegies, a subtle fantasia in
many tongues, which would have been cold as ice but for the vigorous
beam Ronsard shot into the midst of the medley—a tiny volume, brilliant,
ingenious, perverse, like the princess’s soul, full of pretty verses all
alike—alike in expression, with the same silvery veneer of tenderness—the
very image of the somewhat phantasmagoric and unreal romanticism in which
some mystic women delighted: brightness, but no warmth or life. Yes,
Margaret was too fond of these intense lights and shades. A thousand
causeless murmurings woke echoes in her soul. She sustained herself
upon the subtle aroma wafted on certain nights upon the breath of the
quickening world. She never heard the full, resounding roar of the sea in
the darkness, but was content to see the fringe of foam.
At the moment when Margaret disappeared, the power of women in France
seemed at its apogee; in reality, it was on the wane. It was attacked
more especially on the moral side. According to so-called Puritans like
Agrippa, the influence of women resulted in the declension of morals; and
what a declension! Everything converged towards the joys of the senses;
painters could no longer paint anything but boudoir scenes, architects
could only open doors or pierce balconies, husbands only speculate on the
exploits of their wives, Luther only recommend the reading of stories
(sometimes astonishing) from the Bible.
Unquestionably, feminine influences, even the purest, seemed soft and
enervating. The energetic spirit of old France, of the time before
Francis I., sprang suddenly to life again. A country gentleman, Du
Bellay, sounded the charge against Roman cosmopolitanism by claiming
France for the French. At one stroke, as J. M. de Heredia has said, his
clear and picturesque style clean obliterated Marot, Saint-Gelais, and
the whole of Margaret’s school. Du Bellay would have loved Savonarola:
he speaks the same tongue as the friends of Anne of France; he has sworn
implacable hatred against platonism with its cloying sweetness, against
the languors of petrarchism: “He has not breathed in the ardour that
sets Italy in flame.” Though he has seen Rome, decadent Rome, he has not
caught her infection; it is she that he blames, and yet the “bashful
squires,” the “exiles from joyance,” and other vulgar “fantasticals,”
whom he flagellates and sends packing along with the Round Table, were
very often French. He has in his veins the proud and lusty blood of a
soldier. Like Anne of France he worships truth, and candour, and lucidity.
Ronsard too, of like blood and ancestry, advocates truth: “I love not
the false, I love the true.” He overwhelms with his vigorous eloquence
all sham loves, “Cupids with curled love-locks, but broken arrow”; all
the platonic cant, so virtuous in show and so little virtuous in fact:
and all these refinements, and hypocrisies, and conceits on twofold
incorporeal love!
Aimer l’esprit, Madame, c’est aimer la sottise.[450]
The voices of these two men stirred up no little commotion among a large
number of the lesser nobility or quasi-nobility, men of middling station,
less sensible to high-falutin’ than to the spirit of frankness and
independence—“gaillards,” as they styled themselves, who loved women as
they loved “daylight and the sun,” but as men, by no means with an idea
of “playing lackey to a mistress,” particularly one who was wrinkled,
painted, or terribly accomplished.
De Junon sont vos bras, des grâces vostre sein,
Vous avez de l’aurore et le front et la main,
Mais vous avez le cœur d’une fière lionne.[451]
That was their type. And they laughed at the Vadiuses and Trissotins[452]
of their day, at all the fine carollings that Du Bellay amused himself
by imitating, forgotten tunes of long ago, the faded frippery of the
ballroom. What merriment there is when a belated poet returns from Italy
with another _Amadis_! Neither Olivier de Magny nor Baïf will take the
moon for the sun, or love for a mere ornamentation.
The men of the Pléiade had no love for patronage or the Medici species.
They hated and abhorred the Jews. Ronsard would have liked to see a fine
St. Bartholomew butchery of them, and could not forgive Titus for wasting
his chances: his gorge rises at the thought of a Leo the Hebrew[453]
figuring among the sages of platonism. Good decent fellows, they drape
themselves in their somewhat rustic free-and-easiness. From their modest
snuggeries they proudly tell the king “Nature has made us of the same
flesh and blood as you”;[454] they do not hesitate to write to a Medici
lady that the finest royalty is to be “king of oneself.”[455] They vie
with one another in launching their epigrams against the court, the
salons, the ruling women;[456] they sing of woods and dales, even of the
wild untrammelled life—
O bienheureux le siècle où le peuple sauvage
Vivoit, par les forêts, de gland et de fruitage.[457]
—_Ronsard._
They sing praise to Nature their mother, not an abstraction, an
infinity, but immeasurable:[458] the lines of the horizon, it would
seem, spring from their hearts, and like an outspread fan gather up the
whole immensity of life. How remote this from the gardens of philosophy
ordered so delicately, with their shimmering fountains, their shivering
Venuses![459]
When under a clear Roman sky Du Bellay is sauntering in pleasant
indolence amid all the pomp and luxury of cultured prelates, enjoying
the serene life of country villas; when, as a background to the picture,
behind carriages and laurels, fashionable women and noble statues, he
sees flushed in a golden haze the forest of towers, and pediments, and
obelisks, and St. Peter’s in all its majesty, the glory of the world,
what does his heart say to him?
Quand reverray-je, hélas! de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée?[460]
Such was the sentiment of the Pléiade.
Social philosophy had changed all at once. People were weary of the idea
of the beautiful, and henceforth the wind was to set towards scepticism:
no longer an airy, Ciceronian, superficial scepticism, the scepticism
of Cardan, or of Erasmus, the jabberer of Latin, the flouter of monks,
often madder than the madmen he derides, but a masculine aggressive
scepticism, which believes in nothing in this world, not even in love,
and is incredulous about the other world and the immortality of the soul.
Yet it feels an “impression” of the unseen: deprived of an ideal for this
life, it must willy-nilly suppose another apart from mortal men, and
thus yearningly, gropingly, unawares, it takes a step towards Christ.
And then those who are still reasoning in this untoward generation
laugh or weep. What a harsh harrowing laugh is that of Boistuau,[461]
who had nevertheless been a friend of Margaret! Boistuau speaks to us
of love, and tells us that it is a distressing malady of the mind,
characterised by symptoms of agitation and disorder, and exhausting
all its energies, physical and moral. You hear those attacked by it
groaning and dropping words like “coral, alabaster, roses, lilies”; they
have lost all individuality; they sob and abase themselves and are a
continual supplication. The cause of the malady is obscure; some speak of
magnetism, others of microbes, others of the influence of the stars.
It was this kind of scepticism which was destined to lead us to the
morality of Charles IX.’s court.
Then it was seen how fatal had been the disease of sensibility, and the
profound soul-weariness which resulted from imaginative pleasures, from
the mirage which overlay the things of life since women had undertaken to
interpret everything through the affections. It had been a woful error
to create an art of sensibility! Sensibility serves to attract men, but
cannot hold or guide them. Women believe in sensibility because they
always consider the heart of a man as a reservoir of moral strength. It
is the other way about; men for the most part err through weakness; it
is that which renders them inconstant and vicious. They would gain in
steadfastness and goodness if women, less timid and more active, had
strength rather than tenacity, and a real energy under an appearance of
tenderness.
An attempt was made, but too late, to show that the feminist spirit could
display energy as well as tenderness.
A certain Almanque Papillon[462] proposed a new formula of love, more
robust than platonism, and bound, as he thought, to render men truly
“virtuous and not effeminate.” François Billon, one of the royal
secretaries, wandering one evening amid the ruins of Rome, felt the
touch of grace within himself. He dreamed of writing a book entitled
_The Impregnable Fortress of the Female Sex_. He descried and saluted
among the shadows a number of vigorous women—Catherine de’ Medici and
Jeanne d’Albret, more valorous than any man; Mesdames de Berry and de
Nevers, surpassingly witty; Anne d’Este, duchess of Guise, the eloquence
of fleshly beauty. Billon made his book, but not his fortune. Under the
Valois, many women were not anxious to be too well defended.
Ronsard and Du Bellay triumphed, then: and yet, to all appearance, their
triumph troubled them; they hankered after ideas they had gone about to
destroy; they mistrusted themselves, their friends, their principles.
Ronsard had an admirable genius, but he hesitated between an attempt to
satisfy the popular naturalism with the crudities so much in request,
and an instinctive thirst for an aristocratic spiritualism. He followed
rather than led the movement; both he and Du Bellay, in spite of their
robust breezy energies, remained more sensitive than they cared to
acknowledge to the charm of classical art and the graciousness of the
salons.
Further, an eminent woman kept a tight rein on the Pléiade, and showed
them that graciousness was not necessarily tameness, that there were
women’s hearts at once ardent and strong, that it is possible to retain
practical views of life while “rising wholly towards spiritual things.”
This woman was the niece and goddaughter of Margaret of France, her
spiritual daughter and the faithful guardian of her fame—the second
Margaret of France, duchess of Berry and afterwards duchess of Savoy.
She pursued a totally different method from her aunt. She abandoned
philosophy, intuitions, mystic professions of faith: instead of wearing
black she dressed fashionably, tricking herself out with jewels
and brightly-coloured materials: thus (pardon the detail) she used
handkerchiefs of crimson silk: that formed part of her psychology. Her
household was maintained on a very princely scale, and directed by the
solemn Madame de Brissac, who never shifted her quarters without taking
with her a huge pile of dresses and especially a terribly big bed, which
alone required several mules to carry it; the moment the destination
was reached, Madame de Brissac’s bed had to be set up with infinite
precautions, as though it were a shrine. One can guess how the treasurer,
among many other people, grumbled; but the princess was so kind!
With this system of simplified morals and external complexity, Margaret
of Savoy exercised extraordinary fascination over men’s affections. She
had adopted as emblem an olive branch guarded by serpents, with the
motto, “_Sagesse, gardienne des choses!_” She resembled, as a poet tells
us, “a rose-bud, nourished on celestial dew,” and received the nickname
of Pallas. She was just the woman to govern vigorous men: a woman of
taste and intelligence, who had a passion for winning love, but with much
breadth and dignity, and without recourse to the spiritual and material
experiments of her aunt. Her secret she had not gone far to seek, but
had found simply in her woman’s heart; her Machiavelism consisted in
a kindliness carried to perfection, intelligent, active, ingenious—a
refined good-heartedness, which embraced both rich and poor. Des Périers
himself could not refrain from speaking of it in a tone of respect and
sympathy quite unusual in him; Brantôme has painted the princess in one
magnificent phrase: “She was _the_ goodness of the world.”
And we must not forget that life had not spared her hard lessons. The
poor woman’s greatest ambition was to root and ground herself in the
family affections, and these affections had been torn from her one by
one with her heart’s blood. Her father Francis I. had as little to do
with her as possible, indeed, but scantily appreciated her. She lost her
brother Charles miserably enough; at that period it was not the custom
to care for life’s halt and maimed, yet Margaret sedulously watched over
servants who were out of employment. Her heart was wrapped up in her
sister Madeleine. Madeleine coveted a crown; she went to Scotland, and
six months afterwards came news of her death. Margaret was so grievously
stricken that she remained in utter prostration, and it was doubtful
for some time whether her health would recover from the shock. Her aunt
Margaret had to intervene to insist on her taking care of herself, and
going for long morning walks in the park of Fontainebleau.
Thus, instead of “devouring her heart,” in the forcible phrase of
Pythagoras, this noble princess made existence a song of grave and warm
passion, not a song of love.
Her disappointments were no fewer, it is true, since it is a natural
law for the heart to be deceived in its hopes, like the reason; but she
found less bitterness and more grief; the wholesome contact with real
suffering, in bringing out the true power of sympathy, saved her from
social and intellectual extravagances, and bred in her that perfection of
tenderness which no one could resist; for the world itself loves to be
treated seriously.
The passion Du Bellay felt for her in no way resembles either the flowery
sentimentalism to which princesses had till then been accustomed, or the
coarse freedom of Marot’s school: it was a constant, sincere, and lasting
passion. On returning from Italy, he exclaims with the same emotion as at
his departure:
Alors, je m’aperçus qu’ignorant son mérite,
J’avois, sans la connoistre, admiré Marguerite,
Comme, sans les connoistre, on admire les cieux.[463]
And these are not mere idle words. Many years afterwards, when it came to
Margaret’s turn to leave her country, the poor poet, struck, no doubt,
with presentiments of an imminent death, shed real tears, “the truest
tears that e’er I shed.”
The great sense of truth and constancy that Margaret carried into the
concerns of the heart she applied also to the concerns of the mind. She
showed, like Anne of France, how women were slandered, how they slandered
themselves when they fancied they were incapable of a genuine effort;
instead of pouring out a stream of conversation and writings like her
aunt, and of trusting to her impressionability merely, she applied
herself with all the force of a fine intellectual health to the most
rigorous tasks involved in the discipline of truth. Many scholars by
profession would not have pushed solicitude for the niceties of truth
so far. She got her reader, for instance, to buy for her at Paris three
different editions of Cicero’s _Offices_; she read Aristotle’s _Ethics_
simultaneously in Greek and in a Latin translation; she collated six
commentaries on Horace.
Although entirely French—she was much more French than her aunt—she
set herself to stem the somewhat too violent tide of reaction setting
in against Italy. Like Louis XII. before her, she thought there was
much in Italy and the classics that was worth adopting; while she read
Aristotle she proclaimed Urbino the “school of knowledge,” and Du Bellay
had to draw in his horns and, under her gentle guidance, acknowledge the
charm which he did not feel spontaneously. He not only translated Bembo
and Naugerius,[464] but went so far as to agree that time would never
extinguish the fame of Boccaccio, and that the laurels of Petrarch would
remain for ever green.
She did more (for the words “art” and “patriotism” cloaked in reality
questions infinitely smaller, and larger—questions of personal
jealousies); she had the courage to keep by her side an Italian, Baccio
del Bene, an enthusiastic worshipper of the “pearl of the West,” who
declared he had been saved by her bright eyes, “his stars,” from the
direst of shipwrecks. Ronsard undertook, against wind and tide and his
own convictions, to rehabilitate this relic of the past, and to proclaim
that Del Bene was the only Italian for two centuries who was worth
consideration.
Margaret long remained the tutelary “virgin,” the spirited “unbacked
colt,” running where frolic fancy led her, unfretted by the “spurs of
love.” Whatever the inevitable malignity of mankind may have said, she
was a perfect type of platonism, basking in her many warm friendships
with men, and in no hurry to be married. Too much attached to France
to go far away, too thoroughly a princess to wed one of her brother’s
subjects, she fixed her choice on the heir of Savoy. On one occasion
she did not hesitate to accompany her aunt to Nice and present herself
in person, in defiance of the elementary rules of etiquette; but as
politics, the bane of sentimental princesses, threw obstacles in the way,
she possessed her soul in patience, and waited twenty-one years. She was
married in 1559.
The king of France ordered a magnificent trousseau, an exact copy of that
of Madame de Lorraine—gold-embroidered dresses, laces, jewels; he chose
for the bridal dress a robe of yellow satin with bodice embroidered in
gold, a regal mantle trimmed with lace a foot wide, an evening cloak in
silver cloth, lined with lynx fur. He commanded splendid entertainments.
Everyone knows what followed—Henri II. mortally wounded in the official
tournament; this long-desired marriage consecrated at midnight beside a
bed of anguish. Here truly was something to amaze and strike with awe.
Anyone with a touch of superstition would have attributed to the princess
the evil eye.
They knew better, to be sure.
If she was loved, it was because she had the very uncommon talent of
loving her friends.
No sooner was she in Piedmont than she seemed to have thoughts only for
them. She wrote to Catherine de’ Medici commending Ronsard to her notice,
and the poet, much moved, hastened to reply with a noble apostrophe to
the royal house of France, “happy and fruitful ... mother of such a line
of kings.”
From time immemorial France and Piedmont had played in the world the
somewhat ungrateful part of quarrelsome lovers. Margaret, like a true
woman, patched up this quarrel; while she lived there was no open
rupture. Still more, every Frenchman who visited Turin was conscious of
being anticipated by a gentle and invisible protecting hand. Presented to
the duchess, often lodged and entertained at her cost, he would receive
in addition, anonymously, a purse to defray his travelling expenses.
France did not, therefore, lose Margaret altogether; but she planted
in Savoy the sweetness of Urbino with the sparkling brilliance of her
own land. At the gates of Geneva she caused the most perfect religious
peace to flourish; it was there that Francis de Sales was born. Without
flinging heart and mind piecemeal to the winds, like her aunt, we see her
in a corner of that violent 16th century, a radiant centre of kindliness
and spiritual illumination, surrounded by testimonies of gratitude as by
a modest and glorious retinue. She often received thanks at that supreme
moment when all men speak the truth. In his last hour Du Bellay wept for
her; an ambassador of France at Constantinople left her his fortune;
L’Hôpital declared in his will that to her he owed his whole career.
She herself on her deathbed heaved, so to speak, the last breath of the
feminist spirit.
Il ne restoit rien d’entier de la France,
De pur, de saint, d’une antique bonté,
Que Marguerite, humaine déité.[465]
And now what more is to be said? The hateful orgies of the 16th century
were unchained! Here and there in the turmoil some few feeble shoots
of platonism continued to appear[466] under the form of preciosity or
literary feminism, till we come to the hôtel de Rambouillet.[467] Women
of energy and activity were still seen. But fate willed that the 17th
century, magnificent, wholly masculine,[468] should be ushered in with
terrible convulsions. It was a momentous and appalling epoch, and bore
out the prediction of the _Heptameron_: “The best things are those from
which, when abused, result the worst ills.”[469] What a spectacle is the
court of the Valois![470]—all these sly, knowing women, talking in a way
to make the shades of their grandmothers blush, running after men who
wish them further! How little the third Margaret of France, the first
wife of Henri IV., resembles her earlier namesakes! She was as highly
gifted, prettier, as accomplished, as witty, as fascinating, as noble, as
thoroughly a princess—so princely indeed that she thought herself quite
entitled to love gipsies and let prejudices go hang! Fair as a lily, too,
polished, wonderfully polished, bathed and perfumed! All she saw was that
platonic love had broken down, and of the other love she said: “Nothing
could be so sweet, if it were not so short.”
Even in Spain platonism perished, or rather it winged its flight towards
God with zest and ardour, often worthy of the Song of Songs:[471] “A
love redeemed from all terrestrial things, and having only God for its
object,” exclaims St. Theresa, “is like an arrow shot by man’s will
towards his God with all the force of which he is capable.” Or else it
was flung out of window. When the cook and the niece of Don Quixote make
a bonfire of the _Amadis_ romances and other illustrious annals of pure
love and valiant exploits, the good Spanish curate, who assists at the
auto-da-fé, momentarily hesitates before a volume bearing the name of
Ariosto. He opens it, to burn it if it is a Spanish translation, to kiss
it if it is the Italian text. O relic of old Spain! O son of the Cid!
In Italy the crisis could not take a tragic development, as in Germany,
but men felt the need of returning to anonymity, to placid affection, to
love without any twaddle. “The learned are so mad after love,” writes
Nelli, “they have so pounded and minced and dissected it, that it is
altered out of all knowing.” Petrarch was blasphemed: everyone was eager
to revile him as a flashy rhetorician, to sneer at his so-called purity.
They declared that they preferred to the sighs of love-sick princesses
and the sentimental romances, the bold, frank love of a coster-wench.
Farewell to the dream! It dissolved in a religious crisis. Rome herself
recovered from her intoxication, and no longer existed as the nursery of
sentimental philosophy and the liberal-minded instructress of mankind.
La paix et le bon temps ne règnent plus icy;
La musique et le bal sont contraints de s’y taire.[472]
Attacked, Catholicism had stood to the defence in the armour of
authority. It was fighting for life, and was bent only on self-discipline
and purification. One good soul devoted himself to the task of
spiritualising the writings of Bembo.
The tender imaginings of art disappeared. The time was coming for art
itself to return to scenes of domestic commonplace, as in Holland, or of
pure reason, as in France. The sole impression Brantôme received as he
viewed the Coliseum was that its ruined condition was most strikingly
apparent at the top—as was seen also with women.
The mortification would have been less acute if people had not really
expected to find happiness, and if they had begun by looking painful
realities square in the face as they did afterwards. The 17th century
left philosophy to the philosophers; it believed in suffering as a gift
of God: Pascal coldly investigated only the secret of the anxieties which
hold us by the throat; and so that admirable time of vigorous action and
patient endurance led us to philosophy.
Platonist tenderness resulted in nihilism. And then how sad a spectacle
was the spiritual Sahara! And how well men understood, as soon as women
had disappeared, that they were right in believing them necessary! Our
great Montaigne, who arises at this moment, is a splendid eulogist of the
cold and colourless in life. He is the perfect son of this respectable
land of France, where wisdom consists in settling down in a benevolent
neutrality, without hating, and without loving: life being such, without
restraints, without illusions, nothing is left, surely, but to die.
Montaigne, in his cool, common-sense way, delights in making mincemeat
of everything that has given women faith and enthusiasm and an object in
life.
The heart! what a dangerous organ, essentially a thing to keep under
restraint! Better forgive a folly than a victory!
Love! After having distilled out its quintessence, after having
discovered “three, four, or five degrees of superior things” external to
ourselves capable of producing it, is it not found that wisdom lies in
looking after one’s own interests, in loving as little as possible, in
loving one’s children perhaps, but even then with sufficient tranquillity
“to live comfortably after their loss”?
Goodness!—that does not exist in the pure state, but contains always
some taint of corruption, a savour of mortality, which Plato should have
discerned: “Man is but patchwork and motley.”
The quest for the Beautiful! How conventional! Let us hear no more of
Bembo or Equicola! “When I write, I do very well without the company and
the stay of books!”
Fame! A mere bubble, at the mercy of every puff of wind, dissolving under
our own eyes, ere we reach the grave! Fame!—for books or ideas which are
fated to disappear as everything has disappeared!—a name which changes
and will pass to others!
The charm of original thought! Ah! the ridiculous pretension of wishing
to transcend the current opinions, the common sense of one’s fellows, and
to fancy oneself “capable of all things.” It is on this head that we must
hear Montaigne; he has no more illusions about the mind than about the
heart: he warms up, and celebrates in Shakespearian accents the immensity
of the human void.
And is he wrong when he tells us that we are our own deceivers?—that
we are unwilling to confess our ignorance lest we scare our children?
“Overmuch knowledge is harmful, as in virtue. Keep in all points to the
common highway: ’tis not good to be so subtle and nice.... Shun all
novelty and oddity.... All extravagant ways vex me.... In my time, those
who have some rare excellence beyond others, and some extraordinary
sprightliness of mind, we see as it were overflowing into license in
opinion and morals.... We are right to set upon the human mind the
rigidest barriers we can.”[473]
The traitor! How he laughs at himself and his friends! At bottom he is
a son of women[474] and of love, but he has lost women and love. The
shallow epicurism with which his doctrine may be reproached is also the
weak side of feminism, which had already shown us the madness and error
of the idea of saddling the few years we have to spend on earth with
fatigue, tribulation, vanities. And yet, while inheriting this need for
living the easy impressionist life, Montaigne revolts with characteristic
feeling and vigour against women, because he belongs to a disillusioned
generation which feels constrained to wreak personal vengeance against
those who had been confounding the religion of beauty with the religion
of happiness. Religion consists in resignation to unhappiness, while
beauty and happiness are in truth somewhat loosely connected. The keeper
of a museum who spends his life among masterpieces will acknowledge, if
you put it to him, that one can be very unhappy there. Further, perched
in his rustic turret, between his few books and a large farmyard,
Montaigne is one of those peaceable and self-satisfied country folk who
have not succeeded in understanding what all the pother is about, or how
women could ever pass for priests or physicians. He considers them as
objects serviceable, even necessary, to men, but socially speaking he
chants their _De Profundis_.
His bile is moved at the sight of the grand duchess taking the head of
the table in the ducal palace at Florence. What a rage he flies into!
“She has wheedled the prince”; is it by “her pleasant and commanding
features,” or her beautiful bosom? Don’t talk to him of the ideal. Take a
peep into this dressing-room—rouge-pots, false teeth, second-hand lures,
perfumes like musk derived from the “discharge of animals,” and all the
rest: this is the ideal, forsooth, you think of making the axis of life!
To him (the phrase will serve, it is homely but exact) platonism is the
art of palming off paste for diamonds.
Yet the same scoffer Montaigne has for aide-de-camp a simple maiden,
Mademoiselle de Gournay; and, after all, his whole system comes to
this—that we should do well to be women, nay children; and that the best
thing for us would be to live like the bird on the bough, with no other
care than the due round of the seasons.
But no: this is an impossibility! There are no seasons for us, we have
no right to expect seasons! or rather, we have only a summer,—life; only
a winter,—death! And this winter lies hungrily in wait for us! It comes
to this—that the science of life is the science of death! “The continual
work of our life is to build up death.” Since there is neither beauty
nor love, in other words no life, we are but animated corpses: our life
plunges into the stream of death, emerges, and disappears again; we live
on death as a tulip lives in its water, or corn in its refuse. Then, like
the tulip and the corn, we go through the inverse process: “Your death
is part of the order of the universe, a piece of the life of the world.”
From your disintegrated flesh the vital energy will spring up and pass
into the larva, into the sap of plants, to die yet again and nourish
afresh the butterfly or the bird or the ox, continuing thus its endless
transmigrations. Without hailing death as it passes, like the mystics,
Montaigne is continually brooding upon it, and holds it “in particular
affection,” since that is the only sure conclusion and all the rest is
chimera. Wherever he goes, a grinning spectre seems to go before to show
him the way. Of what account are the fashionable quintessences beside
the clear and insistent spectacle of a bed “surrounded by physicians and
parsons, by creatures all mazed and quaking, by pale-faced lackeys ...
and the room without daylight, the candles lit!” It is just that! And
“the leap to be made with lowered head and dazed brain ... into a depth
of silence and obscurity!” Yes, that is death, as said (merely adding a
word of immortality and hope) those humble monks of the early days of the
century, so violently excluded from philosophic religion; men had stopped
up their ears so as not to hear them, and yet now return soberly to their
scheme of morality, which grips one round like a ring of iron! What does
Ménot say?—
“We die all of us, and like water sink into the earth and return no more
to the surface. Yea, Lord, we all step on towards death. The water of the
Loire ceases not to flow, but is it the water of yestereve that passes
under the bridge to-day? The folk who to-day dwell in this town were not
here a hundred years ago. Now, I am here; next year you will have another
preacher. Where is king Louis, but late so dread a monarch, and king
Charles, who in the flower of his youth set Italy aquake? Alas! the earth
has already rotted his corpse. Where are all these damsels of whom we
have heard so much? Have you not the Romance of the Rose, and Melusina,
and many another far-famed beauty? Behold, we all die, and like the water
we enter into the earth, to return no more for ever.”
Montaigne is right. Whether we like it or not, we have to live in contact
with the enemy, that is, with reality. Only, is it absolutely necessary
to look at reality so mistrustfully, and to ask of it but gloomy
impressions? All the enemies of faith maintain that faith cannot but be
sombre and melancholy; in making itself pleasant and speaking of a God
of Love, religion, it seems, would lie and do them wrong, would trench
on their domain, would go beyond its part, which consists in expiation
and sacrifice. Material joy—that is their creed; and at the same time
they believe it is a great mistake to wish to rule the world by love; men
are not held by spiritual systems; you buy them, crush them, oppress and
coerce them.
Nevertheless, all was not false in the delicious dream of prelates,
women, platonists. Pure love is too exquisite a thing ever to exist in
this world. But it is the business of women to strive towards it, and to
show that we have need of it. The idea of dividing the world, of leaving
bodies to men and souls to women, had something to be said in its favour.
Men are sometimes too philosophical, women never philosophical enough.
The convulsions which broke out every time men wished to turn the tables
on women, in the 16th century, and in the 18th, are not sufficient to
convince us that the unmitigated employment of force is the ideal of
politics. What human being is there, even with all the sentiment crushed
out of him, who does not feel an unquenchable thirst for happiness!
Nations also feel this thirst. No, it cannot be said that the need of
happiness is but an empty dream: it is a real need, sincere, imperious,
natural, a moral and physical need which takes entire possession of us,
in which all things are summed up—this need in which we live and die.
We live and die in it! We should have to remain always children, or
strangely to shut our eyes, not to see falling around us the victims of
life’s ironies, felled by Montaigne’s philosophy as surely, as clearly,
as by a dagger-thrust.
A proverb says that one does not die of love: perhaps; but what we know
with absolute certainty, what stares us everywhere in the face in letters
of fire and blood, is that one dies of the absence of love, one dies of
inanition.
Hence it will always be necessary to ascend to the source of life, to
fix ourselves firmly at the fountain-head: in other words, to nourish
ourselves on beauty. Philosophically, “beauty” and “life” are synonymous
terms; so we have already said, and we shall not cease to revert to this
thought, because it appears to us clear and salutary. All the possible
definitions of beauty apply also to life; life and beauty are one and the
same thing.
Beauty and life generate love and are themselves born of love, so that
love does no more than forge links in the immeasurable chain of life and
beauty. And what men call happiness is the perfect joy of life.
Why did they fail in their schemes of love and peace—these timid women
of the 16th century, who had all that was necessary for success—a heart,
boundless, bottomless ocean of kindliness; an admirable intelligence;
and in many cases knowledge, beauty, wealth? They lacked the courage to
be themselves; they were wanting in passion. Instead of taking their
rightful place they fell back into obedience,—half-hearted dilettanti,
caught in their own snares. Why?
Medieval Christianity was not hostile to the idea of the beautiful, but
it had unduly neglected it, for the purely scholastic and traditional
reason that, strictly speaking, no theory of the beautiful is to be found
in the Gospels.
No, you will not find a theory of the beautiful there. But the
Renaissance unquestionably was right in saying that you find assurances
of life. And how many assurances of love? Christianity is of hope and
love all compact. Love speaks on every page of its early lessons, and
at every moment of its history. The Magdalene, St. Augustine, and many
another—have they not marked stages on the road to heaven? St. Francis
of Sales, Fénelon—were they not yet to cheer by affection the victims of
pure reason?
The Renaissance, then, accomplished a very great advance when, with
Plato’s aid, it instituted the religion of beauty, and in this respect we
certainly cannot reproach the platonists of the 16th century with having
followed a wrong bent. They were right to believe that happiness and
peace can only be effectually secured if men can be induced to turn their
eyes towards the beautiful, to adopt beauty as the beacon of their lives,
to believe through love, act through love, live through love. That, in
truth, is the common substance underlying both Christianity and platonism.
But how then are we to explain the phenomenon we have noted?
Plato, so far as theory and literary style are concerned, is admirable;
why does his teaching end in negative results whenever it is enforced?
Why could he himself deduce from it only a sociology embroidered with
Utopian dreams? Why are those who live familiarly with him and upon him
tortured by the consciousness of the emptiness of things, as was seen in
the 16th century, and as we may see still?
The platonism of the Renaissance had a strange fate. It found a society
in the plenitude of vigour, and save for a few elect souls it left it
dead. As a philosophy, it resulted in perfect scepticism; as a social
panacea, in the wars of religion. It slew art, it slew literature through
the idea of seeking beauty in itself, in other words, by academism, by
art for art’s sake: the aesthetic Utopia alongside of the philosophic
Utopia! Still further, in place of the exquisite, enthusiastic, ardent,
adorable women who were the queens of the world, it gave us, as time
went on, women without energy, without activity, case-hardened with the
idea of a selfish happiness; it left behind it a progeny of coquettes,
_précieuses_, or else of Delilahs and sensual women. The woman of
vigorous and irradiant affection, the woman who used to shed life and
happiness around her, has disappeared. And, finally, we observe that at
the very moment of Plato’s greatest glory, few women steadfastly pursued
the path of happiness: with some, goodness had disappeared in feebleness,
with others intelligence had evaporated in reasoning. They ought to have
saved us from sensualism and metaphysics, and they ran aground on both
reefs. How bitterly they have been reproached! We have done them the
high honour of throwing upon them and their ideas the blame of all our
calamities, as though they were exclusively at fault. As if it would not
have been allowable, after all, to combine common sense with the spirit
of kindliness and love!
If there were, then as always, silly women, profligate women, insatiate
cormorants, why take platonism to task, why blame women alone?
Certain personages of that time, and some of the most notable, refused
to admit any division of responsibility. To them, all that had happened
was bound to happen; the origin was patent, the year 1515; when women of
high rank, admitted to court, determined to devote themselves personally
to the apostolic mission of love, all France took the cue, so that the
idea of love, which issued to begin with from a source insufficiently
philosophic, as it flowed downwards gained nothing and became no
purer. It is very curious to find this line of argument proceeding
from Brantôme’s pen; he is not generally a preacher of virtue, and has
indeed enunciated this eminently courtier-like maxim: “The cast-offs of
great kings could not but be excellent.” According to Brantôme and his
friends, men had undergone an irresistible infatuation for which they
were not to be blamed: thus, he says, no one would regard Francis I. as a
Heliogabalus or accuse him of having employed violence: he was a victim.
All men are victims. It is very true that the frightful demoralisation
of the 16th century sprang from the court, which set the example and
persistently dragged the nation after it. But we shall be permitted to
think that Francis I. and the other victims among his circle, without
being Heliogabaluses, were not anchorites either; which is capable of
demonstration. In any case, it seems to us very difficult to characterise
the doings of the court as platonic: platonism, on the contrary, was a
barrier, and the only reproach we can bring against it is that it was
often leaped.
But the real question is not to know whether there were women of
average or cheap virtue at the court of France, and whether they gave
the tone to others. We want to know whether women like Anne of France,
Vittoria Colonna, Margaret of France, Margaret of Savoy, and their likes
were wrong to strive after high ideals, and whether they did what was
necessary to succeed. This question is much more delicate than the first,
because it really touches platonism and shows how it came to grief.
Women can be reclaimed from sensualism; their necessarily refined
feelings, the passive part they play, the disparity between the advantage
and the disadvantage, conduce easily to disgust. But they never revert
from mysticism to love. The Gospels mention no Jewesses converted by
mysticism, whilst the Magdalene, the Woman of Samaria, the Woman taken
in Adultery, see Heaven’s light while in the full flush of sensualism.
Men, on the contrary, often get the better of mysticism, because their
instincts scarcely lie that way, and moreover the throng and press of
realities only too easily brings them down to earth.
Now, Plato, even when rendered practical by the theory of two loves,
which sanctioned curious concessions, represented the algebra of the
beautiful; but you cannot make algebra your daily bread.
Women of the highest distinction, and especially those we have named,
lived with Plato as it were in a balloon: there was no more actual
communication with the world, no more really practical energy, no
more heat and flame! The rope was cut; they were adrift in the clear
and rarefied atmosphere of an altitude of thousands of feet. What an
illusion, and how disastrous! Instead of elevating the world, this was
the very means of abandoning it to itself. How many strange visions this
dizzy height brought before their eyes!
First, the idea of living face to face with the absolute, and of
importing the absolute into life—pride of thought of the vainest kind!
To adopt St. Augustine’s figure, you might as well shut up the ocean in
a hole in the sand! As De Musset said: “My glass is small, but from my
glass I drink.” The realms of space do not furnish a substantial love,
and it is vexatious enough to leave that love grovelling on the earth.
Secondly, along with this supramundane mysticism, platonism developed
the exclusive contemplation of self, another deplorable mistake. We
live in virtue of a continual exchange, as physiological and moral laws
equally prove. God alone can rejoice in perfect independence of life and
happiness; the condition of us men is to be happy through give and take;
we have to receive everything, but also to give everything. To search for
happiness within oneself allows no room for enthusiasm or an enlarged
current of life, nor, consequently, for life itself: one withers up like
a tree which should forbid its roots to imbibe moisture from the soil,
its branches to breathe.
The poor dear women, once isolated in the boundless tracts of their
imagination, became giddy, fell a prey to needless torments, lost the
precious gift of simplicity, which was so natural to them in their
capacity as great ladies—that excellent and wise simplicity of mind
which assigns us our place in the vast sequence of things, according to
the will of God. They hovered too far out of touch with realities, they
generalised, wished to grasp too much, they grew restless and uneasy,
which rendered them a prey to intriguers: their sensibility had no
ballast. To influence humanity, they had first to influence the human
beings they had at hand. So long as their mission remained individual,
private, concrete, intimate, it produced satisfactory results. How many
men did they carry up with them into the heights! But when they wanted
to act upon mankind at large, the game was up. Trying to influence
everybody, they ended by influencing nobody. Thus Vittoria Colonna gave
to her beloved Michelangelo forces which he turned to admirable account;
but in her abstract efforts towards public regeneration she completely
failed.
Let us add that Frenchwomen had a much more difficult mission to fulfil
than the Italian women. Spell-bound by the example of Italy, they fancied
that what had succeeded there was sure to succeed here, and they did
not even see (so great was their taste for blind imitation) that they
were behind the fair, that they were importing among us the imitation
of a decadent art, the imitation of an imitation, a counterfeit love, a
counterfeit curiosity, a counterfeit scheme of life. What they should
have done was to inspire robust activities, to cause, no matter whence
or how, a gush of ideas beautiful, striking, original, soul-stirring;
instead, they refined and subtilised and complicated, they wasted their
ingenuity in seeking to discover which was the more aesthetic, poetry or
painting; complication seemed to them to be art, and not the apprentice
stage of art: they never attained that noble logic which is art itself.
Truly strong souls know well that you cannot nourish the world on
sweetstuffs merely, that a decided will is needed in life, and that the
beautiful becomes one with the true when truth has all its potency. Happy
are those who skilfully draw love from truth!—the ploughman who loves
his furrow, the poor man who loves his poverty, the maiden who loves her
purity! We find among women many valiant souls of the stamp of Anne of
France, able thus to lay hold of life. As to those who allow themselves
to be led astray by the obsession of an abstract and too lofty ideal,
they die.
Platonism, then, marked a great advance towards the idea of beauty,
but it did not accomplish any striking progress towards the idea of
happiness, and Nifo was not far wrong in predicting that the doctrine
of two loves, the one celestial, immaterial, good, and desirable, the
other terrestrial and carnal, would result in mere negation, by setting
men between impossible alternatives—a colloquy of angels, or, as M.
France says, a colloquy of chimpanzees. We may regret our condition,
but how escape from it? Natural law (that is, divine law) bids us
disdain none of the gifts of God, but to obtain from each its particular
beauty. Happiness consists really in loving what we have round about
us, in appropriating therefrom all that is beautiful and congenial,
and in affectionately conforming to Nature without coercing her, so as
to nourish ourselves upon her spiritual and physical forces, and to
assimilate her warmth and energy and her universal harmony.
In our own day John Ruskin has been one of the apostles of happiness
under this aspect, and though his doctrine may be difficult to define,
he has unquestionably carried the idea of platonism a stage further, in
harmony with the saying of Plato which we have already quoted: “Those who
know have impressions.”
The impressions on which he lived were often inconsistent, and still more
often nebulous, one might almost say musical. He has been taunted with
his apparent lack of logic, though the glitter of his thought by its very
brilliance often conceals a logic that is sufficiently real. But, after
all, he has unduly neglected the spiritual side of Nature, in particular
the human soul. While we cannot shut our eyes to the existence of the
body and the utility of earthly possessions, it is at the same time good
and necessary for happiness to keep the body and material well-being on
the lower plane. The body is essentially localised, wealth is limited,
and, for both, giving spells exhaustion; only the soul can spend itself
unceasingly, and grow the richer thereby. And thus social happiness
results, so to speak, from the socialism of souls.
Ruskin belongs to the old Venetian school, materialistic, and pagan; his
heart has echoed to physical harmonies, and to him a certain material
socialism would not have been unpleasing. Yet he has well shown what we
ought to feel in our communion with Nature, he has glorified the worship
of beauty and happiness, which consists in guessing at God, in seeing
Him, in acclaiming Him in the beauty of mountains as in the beauty of a
heart overflowing with tenderness and love, in all that is beautiful,
and beautiful for us. His essential idea is that everything around us
produces an impression upon us, and that we ourselves have a duty to
our environment. Gardens are no longer a mere setting of life, they are
alive. Ruskin goes so far as to extol the idea of sacrificing ourselves
for posterity—to plant forests under whose shade our descendants may
live, to build cities in which future nations will be able to dwell.
It is a far cry from these undulatory but noble theories to the egoistic
enjoyment of oneself; yet it is very certain that to carry them into
practice in reasonable measure is the way to find happiness.
That is essentially the moral system which women ought to teach—women
born for impressions, for devotion, generosity, the higher life.
Unhappily, Ruskin, little conversant with love and altogether
unacquainted with the domestic affections, never showed in his own life
a really high appreciation of women’s rôle, nor has he less misconstrued
it from the theoretical standpoint. Apart from some sonorous phrases
in which he recommends them to be queens, but in submission to their
husbands, or to practise good social economy in relation to their
dressmakers, it may be said that he did not understand the charm of
women, and that he felt no attraction for their particular beauty. When
he speaks of beauty, whether in regard to modern painters or to the
Greeks, it is always in general terms, without indicating in any way
whether the feminine expression of the beautiful has for him a special
signification. In his enthusiasm for the aesthetics of the Middle Ages
he even admires masculine beauty above all: his type in that case is the
beauty of a stalwart knight.
M. Bourget, for example, has more clearly conceived and accurately
interpreted the necessity of harmony with Nature; his sensations or
sentiments approximate to the philosophy of the Renaissance, and reflect
the spirit of penetrating sweetness which women had undertaken to develop.
“The sincere acceptance of the inevitable,” he says, “supposes a love
for the inevitable, the consciousness, and not merely the idea, that
this obscure universe has a mysterious and kindly signification. In the
depths of our sensibility there exists an indestructible craving that
this world shall contain something wherewith to satisfy our heart, since
this heart is the world’s own child; and the pure and guileless men
whose ever young and tender spirits speak to us across the ages—Francis
of Assisi, Savonarola, those who believed in this bountiful kindness of
the universe, as they breathed, as they lived, with the whole of their
being—these appear to us in a state of unanswerable protest against the
nihilism with which we are stifled. They become the accomplices in us of
a faith which is hardly conscious of itself, and sometimes seeks its way
with tears. ‘Thou wouldst not seek me,’ says the Saviour in the beautiful
_Mystery of Jesus_, ‘if thou hadst not found me.’ Is this phenomenon far
from that other mysterious one which true believers call prayer?”
We can, we must love Nature, because God has placed her all about us, and
because happiness consists in living with what we love. We love things
that are not ideally perfect, in other words, which are not superlatively
beautiful, because happiness presents itself to us under an essentially
relative aspect, and because there is no one but lays claim to it. It is
not even a question of loving beautiful things, then, but, as we said, of
loving what is beautiful in things.
In real life, to be sure, unpleasant things are as common as
blackberries, while pleasant things are few and far between. Nevertheless
the truth of the system of happiness through love is proved by its
efficacy. Just as the pure platonist, penetrated by his glorious ideal,
is cold, unprofitable, and unhappy, the man who loves is conscious
of being filled with strength and light. To love is to have real and
ardent emotions instead of locking oneself in the icy sentimentalism
of reasoning or of false mysticism; it is to become a wellspring of
sweetness, kindliness, activity, a mainstay of the world: it is to sow
life with flowers, to bestow happiness and to possess it. Though placed
by birth in a refractory medium, Ruskin, in spite of his insufficiencies,
contradictions, weaknesses, lacunae, has exercised a profound influence,
while the platonism of Ficino and Bembo, in a land of high sensibility,
amongst incomparable artists and charming women, stifled everything and
throttled itself.
There are, spread over the world, two unequal races which, living
continually side by side, yet never understand each other and never
blend—the race of pride, and the race of vanity. Pride tends to
enthusiasm and advancement; it would be well to have proud women.
Unhappily men, no matter who they are, do not love them, but much prefer
the feeble and the vain.
Yet the efforts of the Renaissance women have not been wholly wasted.
Those noble women sowed for the future, and the germ subsists.
Nor can it be said that their defeat was absolute. To form a sound
judgment on the question we should have to be able (failures being
invariably more noticeable than successes) to gauge the mysterious,
secret operations of their grace; to number the despondent men cheered by
a kind word or a glance of pity or affection; to fathom the resources,
in truth unfathomable, possessed by the spirit of love even when pure,
and possessed by it alone. Women of great soul, the Vittoria Colonnas of
the world, have drawn from it results almost miraculous; and many others,
without turning themselves into a sort of celestial dancing-mistresses,
or becoming lost in worthless caprices, have given us reason to hope
that, what with labour and earnestness and dignity, the end of their
usefulness will not be seen for many a long day.
In short, they took the lead in the profoundest revolution we have ever
experienced; from Louis XI. they led us to the boudoirs of the 18th
century.
We can give their work neither unqualified praise nor condemnation. But
we can praise many of these high-souled women—praise them for having
seen and followed their star, though they at first sight may not have
recognised the more excellent way. With all our reservations, we feel
their spell upon us, because they were interesting, sincere, devoted,
eminently tender, eminently feminine. We can commend them to the sympathy
of those many ladies of our own day who, as we know, are also seeking
their path, and even their star.
Some of my readers may not approve of this conclusion: some will think it
optimistic, others pessimistic: in such matters contradiction is easy.
Will they allow me to reply in advance that such criticisms would not
surprise me? More than once I myself have recast this book, now in the
optimistic direction, now in the pessimistic: a simple historian, in
contact with subtle, fleeting, elusive shades, with women I sought to
see through; as independent as a man may be, in presence of beauties for
three centuries in the grave, when he is grey with years, sated with the
two great spectacles which, according to Montaigne, quiet the soul—the
sight of government, the sight of death,—I would ever and anon catch
myself understanding their witchery, enthralled to their charm, or else
hating their charm, unjustly; and then, at the moment when I fancied I
could at last write my _veni, vidi, vici_, the ideas slipped from my
book like water through a sieve. It is thus I have acquired the right of
loving these dear ghosts.
And now adieu, princesses, cease to tempt us beyond our powers! Only
continue to live amongst us! Our age is very masculine, your spiritualism
pays us but angel visits now!—you have been driven in a thousand ways to
learn what a soulless commercialism is like. And yet, in your better,
spiritual part, you are with us always. We have lovable and accomplished
women, we have women in a true sense aristocratic, whose hearts are
capable of enthusiasm and heroic charities; there have been some whose
names even live after them as synonyms of intelligence and goodness. We
have our Margarets of Savoy, and, in goodly numbers, women whose moral
bearing surpasses that of men; we have even women of energy, and also, it
is said, of tenderness. The day when they proudly resume the motto _Non
inferiora secutus_, and when to their eminent good qualities they add the
talent of being themselves, the will to speak in their own true accents
rather than a borrowed tongue, they will give us back our illusions, and
with them what was not illusion.
Let them renounce public life! But let them take complete possession
of the home life. Let mannish women, if they must, turn doctors, and
womanish women turn priests! Let all be philosophers, comforters,
ministers of love human and divine; let them work through love, and love
through love! Let them have what we lack, let them excel us, enlighten
us, encourage us! And in our hearts we Latins shall bless them, as we
bless the sun. Passion is a warrant-royal of life.
The moral of our book is that good women should love the beautiful, and
that virtue can be neither tiresome nor torpid.
There is no need to be always a maiden of twelve. True sweetness,
true goodness, true love come, not of naïveté or feebleness, but of
intelligence and personal force.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Madame Vincent has reminded us, in an interesting memoir, that ladies
at one time sat as peers of France.
[2] As administrative authority depended on territorial possessions, it
was quite natural that women should exercise it on occasion. The village
gilds, though composed of men, sometimes elected a woman as president.
[3] “The history of marriage is the history of a relation in which women
have gradually triumphed over the passions, prejudices, and selfish
interests of men: that is the picture of true progress.” (F. Brunetière.)
[4] An Italian caricature of about the year 1450 (repeated by the French
in the sixteenth century) gives a satirical representation of women
violently struggling to wear trunk-hose.
[5] [The manual of religious instruction given to French girls on
attaining the age of twelve.]
[6] Clément Marot on the motto of Madame de Lorraine:
[If love fail, faith is surely slain;
If faith die, love flies hence amain;
So in one motto link the twain—
_Faith and love_.]
[7] One of the most distinguished women of Italy to-day, the Countess
Pasolini, assures us that the great influence still exercised by women
in Italy springs from their approximating more closely than men to
fifteenth-century ideas.
[8] We may say, in passing, that the Italianism of the end of the
fifteenth century, usually regarded as originating with the Italian
expedition of Charles VIII., really goes back to Louis XI. Louis was
Italian in education and tastes. Italians flocked into France during his
reign.
[9] Cornelius Vitelli, styled Corythius by the public, came to France in
1482, for the simple reason that his own country had become unsafe for
him. We have not many details about him or about his colleague, Girolamo
Balbi, a pompous and quarrelsome character. A third Italian, Fausto
Andrelini, made his appearance in 1488, under the auspices of the Marquis
of Mantua. Andrelini, who lived very comfortably at Paris till his death
in 1518, had no other effects than the memories of a little love-affair,
which he confided to us in three books of verses, his “pages of youth,”
as we should say to-day. Exiled, penniless, almost naked, but a poet, he
was, as soon as he arrived, petted, adopted, and idolised, the favourite
of Chancellor Guillaume de Rochefort and of fortune.
[10] Fausto Andrelini was the object of incredible adulation; Erasmus,
wise man, simply calls him “divine,” but some did not hesitate to
proclaim that “he alone had rendered France filled instead of famishing,
cultivated instead of waste, verdant instead of barren, Latin instead of
barbarous.” One of the noblest characters of the time, Guillaume Budé,
actually dedicated to him this amazing epitaph: “Here lies Fausto. If
the Fates had not given him to us, Gaeta herself would not have been
more barbarous than France.” But he was no sooner buried than everyone
regarded him as a knave.
[11] John Ruskin.
[12] [The most prolific and popular eclogue writer of the fifteenth
century (1436-1516).
“As the moste famous Baptist Mantuan,
The best of that sort since Poetes first began.”
—_Alexander Barclay._
Erasmus went so far as to match him with Virgil.]
[13] [The celebrated cabalistic philosopher (1486-1535). He stayed for a
time with Dean Colet in London. He wrote a book _De Nobilitate feminei
sexus_.]
[14] An extract from the marriage of Peregrino will give an idea of the
Romance (Book I., cap. i., p. 32):
“There standing and awaiting the wished-for end, I heard the voice of a
minister of Jupiter, who, regarding both of us, thus spake: ‘Peregrino,
and you Geneva, are you clear and free from every manifest or secret
bond?’ ‘We are free, nor anywhit bounden?’—_Minister_: ‘Are you not
conjoined in affinity?’ _Peregrino and Geneva_: ‘Naught in affinity, and
little in amity!’ _Minister_: ‘Have you promised marriage or betrothal to
any other man or woman?’ _Peregrino and Geneva_: ‘No, never.’ _Minister_:
‘Are you by common consent disposed to celebrate this present holy
sacrament of matrimony?’ _Peregrino and Geneva_: ‘We wish it heartily and
in faith.’ _Minister_: ‘Thee, woman, give I to him, and Peregrino will
put on the ring.’
“Having done his bidding, as it is the wont, we sat ourselves down,” and
a tender conversation ensues between the two spouses.
“O matchless eloquence!” cries Peregrino, “O thrice lucky hour! O blessed
day! O my hope in the sovran guerdon vouchsafed to me! With thee, sweet
my dame, love, and gentleness, and discretion, and prudence have their
habitation, in thee every good thing doth lie hid. Thou art very music,
of all discords the harmony. In all parts I find thee whole and perfect.
Thou art abundant in all humanity and sweetness, and in thy making the
lord and maker of heaven hath created the true copy and sovran revelation
of all things.” The couple dream their souls away in these platonic
effusions. The bride is bedded there and then, and the author omits no
detail. The sun is already high when a young maidservant ventures to come
in and light a fire of twigs.
[15] [The quotation is taken from the _Heptameron_, Tale 40. There the
lady is named Nomerfide, whom the author identifies with a certain Mlle
de Clermont.]
[16] “_Anna_: The maiden invokes with all her prayers the sweets of
wedlock, and yet with the first amorous intoxication begin the woes of
the conjugal bed; the woman is scarce nestled upon the heart of the man
than with one consent they long for separation. _Phyllis_: Anna, little
it recks me that thou decriest the bonds of wedlock and the crabbed sour
race of men; my heart is a-fire with love and I am tormented with thirst
for marriage.... I deem it better far to marry betimes; wedlock is a
refuge where modesty may shelter herself.”—(J. Cats, pp. 6, 7, 16.)
[17] _Heptameron_, Tale 21.
[18] [As these royal ladies are constantly cited in subsequent pages, the
reader will allow us to remind him once for all of their relationships.
Louise of Savoy was the wife of Charles, Count d’Angoulême, cousin-german
of Louis XII., and the mother of Francis I. and of Margaret of Valois.
She was a passionate and masterful woman and completely ruled her son,
and her greed and intriguing spirit brought disaster upon France. Anne of
France, also known as Anne of Beaujeu, was the eldest daughter of Louis
XI., and wife of Pierre II. of Bourbon. She was virtual ruler of France
during the first eight years of the reign of her brother Charles VIII.:
see further Book III., chapter i. She is connected with English history
in so far as it was largely her money that financed Henry of Richmond’s
successful enterprise against Richard III.]
[19] No law in the world had yet authorised them to marry “without the
knowledge, advice, and consent of their fathers” (Rabelais).
[20] The good Anne of France, married to a husband much older than
herself, had in her life a romance which has escaped notice. She was fond
of her first fiancé:
“Le prédit duc de Calabre, famé,
En l’espousant luy donna ung aneau,
Non de grant pris; mais si fut il amé
De par la dame et plus chier estimé
Qu’or ny argent, ne bague, ne joiau
Qu’elle garda, mieulx que plus riche et beau,
Jusque a la mort, c’est vérité patente....”
[“Calabria’s foresaid duke, a prince of fame,
Plighted his troth and gave his bride a ring,
Of no great price, I wot, but yet the dame
Loved him so dear, so high esteemed his name
As never gold nor any precious thing,
Silver nor gem, did her more pleasure bring,
Until her death. ’Tis very truth I tell.”]
The duke died six years after the betrothal,
“Qui fust ung deul qui bien tost ne passa,
Mais grefvement poingnit et trepersa
Le noble cueur de la jeune espousée.
Par quoy, tost fust la chose disposée
Qu’aultre mari prendroit notable et bon,
Ung sien prochain, feu Pierre de Bourbon.”
[“And ’twas a sorrow that not soon did pass,
But smote fell sore and heavily, alas!
The noble heart of this young winsome bride.
Nathless, ere yet her brimming tears were dried,
Another mate was found her, good and high,
Pierre de Bourbon, of her own family.”]
But the princess clung to the ring of her former lover, symbol of
“Loyalle amour dont estoit anoblie ...
... En cest aneau que luy avoit doné
Son amy mort, voullut Pierre espouser.”
[“Of loyal love’s ennobling influence.
And with this ring, gift of her lover dead,
Would she her husband Pierre de Bourbon wed,”]
in order to preserve the memory of him whom God, in his unfathomable
designs, had seen fit to take from her—
“Pour petit cueur, d’une jeune pucelle,
Bien garde est d’amour honneste
C’est quant jamais ne varie ou chancelle ...”
—_Poème inédit de La Vauguyon._
[“To the sweet guileless heart of tender maid
’Tis surety of a chaste and noble love
That changeth never, nor will ever fade.”]
The princess was as pure a woman as any of whom we have any account, but
the author dwells on this innocent romance in order to keep her memory
alive in the hearts of lovers.
[21] [Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547) was the most illustrious member of
an old and illustrious Roman family said to derive its name from the
_column_ to which Christ was bound for His scourging. At the age of
seventeen she married the Marquis of Pescara, and when he died of wounds
received at Pavia (1525) she refused many offers of marriage, and devoted
herself to literature and works of piety. She wrote poems in imitation of
Petrarch.]
[22] [Tiraqueau was the learned and genial seneschal of Fontenoy who
released Rabelais from the tender mercies of the Franciscans, for which
kindness he was eulogised in _Pantagruel_. He had a large family, wrote
many books, and was a water drinker; whence an anonymous epigram which,
roughly rendered in English, reads:
Tiraqueau, fruitful as the vine,
Got thirty sons, but drank no wine;
Not less prolific with the pen,
Produced as many books as men.
And had not water sapped his strength,
So strenuous a man at length
Had filled this world of ours—who knows?—
With books and little Tiraqueaux.]
[23] [A famous physician of Lyons (1471-1540), who founded the College of
Medicine there. He was also a man of action and a writer, and his _Nef
des dames vertueuses_ made him so popular with the ladies that he had to
choose back ways to avoid affectionate mobbing.]
[24]
“Ainsi, comme j’ayme m’amye,
Cinq, six, sept heures et demye
L’entretiendray, voyre dix ans,
Sans avoir paour des médisants,
Et sans danger de ma personne.”
—Clément Marot, _Dialogue nouveau_.
[Thus, as I love my doxy dear,
Five, six, seven hours, nay full ten year
I’ll court her, free from fear of slander:
And scatheless—for I but philander.]
[25] [The great general (1460-1525) who served Charles VIII., Louis XII.,
and Francis I. He conquered Lombardy for Charles, and was killed at
Pavia.]
[26] [See Book II., cap. v.]
[27] [_i.e._ Catherine Sforza, the natural daughter of Galeazzo Sforza,
Duke of Milan. She married the prince of Forli, and on his assassination
by rebels was thrown into prison with her children. But hearing that
Rimini held out for her against all assaults, she offered to carry in
person an order for its capitulation. On arriving before the city,
however, she bade the rebels lay down their arms, and cowed them by sheer
force of character. She married later Giovanni de’ Medici, father of
Cosimo. She defended Forli against Caesar Borgia, but was captured, and
imprisoned in S. Angelo; thence escaping, she retired to Florence, and
soon afterwards died there.]
[28] The countess’s lover.
[29] [Egnazio, a fellow-pupil of Leo X., teacher of eloquence and editor
of Ovid and Cicero, etc.]
[30] _Heptameron_, Tale 25.
[31] _Heptameron_, Tale 25.
[32] [The Yorick of French literature: see Victor Hugo’s _Le Roi
s’amuse_. When Panurge has vainly sought advice from everyone else on
the momentous question, ‘to marry or not to marry?’ he tries Triboulet,
who sends him to consult the oracle of the Divine Bottle (Rabelais,
_Gargantua_, Book III.). Triboulet was court jester to Louis XII. and
Francis I.]
[33] [Of the early part of the 17th century. Her chief work is the
_Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent l’amour_.]
[34] A large number of these _cassoni_ exists. One of the most beautiful
that can be mentioned represents the story of Esther (Chantilly gallery).
The author possesses one that represents Filippo Maria Visconti before
the Emperor.
[35] Two days after his marriage, Girolamo Riario sent his bride a
casket containing diamond necklaces and robes of gold brocade and of
velvet, embroidered with fine pearls; one robe alone carried nearly 3000
pearls; there was also a purse of gold, silver-embroidered girdles,
etc.—(Pasolini.)
[36] _Anna Karenina._
[37]
“Y cuidez-vous avoir repos
En mariage, mes mignons?
Ouy dea!”
[“And think you then to find repose
In marriage bonds, my jolly joes?
Heigh ho!”]
chuckles Roger de Collérye, addressing himself here, however, to men.
[38] “It ought to be a voluptuousness somewhat circumspect and
conscientious.... Is not a man a miserable creature? He is scarce come to
his own strength by his natural condition, to taste one only complete,
entire and pure pleasure, but he laboureth by discourse to cut it off: he
is not wretched enough except by art and study he augment his misery.”
(_Montaigne_, bk. i. cap. xxix. [Florio’s translation]).
[39] [Elder sister (1492-1549) of Francis I., and head of the Renaissance
party in France. Her character is elaborately analysed in subsequent
pages of this book. The quotations under her name are from the
_Heptameron_, and the poems of which she is the reputed author.]
[40] _Heptameron_, Tale 40.
[41] [Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), the author of the famous
_Book of the Courtier_, Hoby’s translation of which has been recently
added to Mr. Henley’s ‘Tudor Translations.’ This book is frequently
quoted from and alluded to in the following pages. It purports to be a
record of conversations held at the Court of Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino
(1472-1508), upon the qualities that make up the perfect courtier,
and many other subjects incidentally. The chief interlocutors who are
mentioned in these pages, are the duchess, Elizabeth Gonzaga; Cardinal
Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), of so fastidious a taste as to revise his works
forty times, the author of _Gli Asolani_, dialogues on platonic love;
Bibbiena; and the coarse and dissolute Pietro Aretino, called Unico
(1492-1557), who alternately satirised and sponged on the great; he wrote
several witty and indecent comedies, and his letters throw much light
on the social life of his time. The reader will find some specimens of
his work _La Cortigiana_ (the Courtesan) quoted in Burton’s _Anatomy of
Melancholy_.]
[42] The abate Serassi has preserved it: “My dear husband, I have got a
little daughter, for which I think you will not be sorry. I have been
much worse than last time, and, as I wrote you, I have had three attacks
of very high fever. To-day, however, I am feeling better, and hope to
have no more trouble. I will not try to write any longer, lest I be over
bold. With all my heart I commend myself to your lordship. Your wife, who
a little _starocca_ with pain. Mantua, August 20, 1520.”
[43] [The duke’s health was ruined by early excesses; Castiglione says
‘gout.’]
[44] [Paolo Giovio, Italian historian (1483-1552), an interesting but
untrustworthy writer. As Brantôme puts it, he used two pens, one of gold,
the other of iron, according as the princes he served treated him!]
[45] _Heptameron_, Tale 68.
[46] _Heptameron_, Prologue and Tale 45.
[47] By ‘amateurs’ we mean men who, while not professionally qualified,
have leisure to devote to extended scientific study. In our own day, as
is well known, M. Pasteur and M. Claude Bernard would not be entitled to
give professional advice.
[48] [Mistress of Henri II., an imperious and avaricious woman, but a
generous patron of the arts. See Hugo’s _Le Roi s’amuse_.]
[49] “I affirm not but I may one day be drawn to such fond opinions,
and yield my life and health to the mercy, discretion, and regimen of
physicians,” says Montaigne. “I may haply fall into this fond madness; I
cannot answer for my future constancy. But even then, if any ask me how I
do, I may answer him as did Pericles, ‘You may judge by that.’” (Bk. II.
chap, xxxvii.)
[50] “O heavenly physician!” cries St. Theresa, “thou dost resemble
only in name these physicians on earth! Thou visitest the sick without
summons, and more gladly the poor than the rich.”
[51] Doctors, further, had to take orders and were not allowed to marry.
[52] [An Italian writer (1508-1568) who “wrote in all styles but excelled
in none.” He wrote two dialogues on matrimony and the misadventures of
husbands.]
[53] Savonarola, who fought in vain against the vogue of astrology (_Opus
singulare contra l’astrologia_: a woodcut represents him disputing with
an astrologer), ridicules the Roman prelates who never moved a step
without consulting their astrologer. The great soldiers and sovereign
princes, such as Lodovico Sforza and Francesco di Gonzaga, were no whit
different. In princely houses a physician who would not condescend
to practise astrology led a sorry life. He points to his phials in
vain; “against death he has no medicine”; while the astrologer, a man
of position, handsome, fat, well-fed, rich, gazes into the boundless
heavens (_Dance of Death_); there was no profession more lucrative than
astrology, none more tempting to ambition. It lent itself to dramatic
effects. First the astrologer was usually a foreigner, no man having
honour in his own country—an Italian or German, or, better still, a Moor
or Gipsy. He puts on airs and keeps his clients waiting. If someone sends
him a birth date, to have his horoscope cast, he sends no reply; his eyes
are so fatigued by constant watching! he is so tired! And the awestruck
princesses in the waiting-room say to one another that patience is
necessary with “such geniuses.” And the stars were put to marvellous uses.
Bonaventure des Périers relates the amusing story of a physician of
Paris, who, alleging high astrological reasons, never showed any
amiability to his wife except on rainy days. The despairing lady at
last hit upon a very simple expedient: every evening she had a tub of
water emptied on the roof so as to produce the sound of a shower in
the gutter-spout, and it rained every day! At this game the physician
came off second-best and died; and his widow, who found herself very
well off, was besieged with numerous offers. She incontinently sent
all the physicians packing, then asked her other suitors if they were
familiar with the moon and stars. Everyone thought it well to make solemn
affirmation that he was, and received his _congé_. There was only one who
was simple enough to confess that his science was limited to taking moon
and stars to witness when he went to bed. He gained the day (_Contes et
Récréations_, Tale 95). No glory was wanting to astrology; physicians
and savants practised, defended, and taught it; great nobles gave it
their patronage. Marshal Trivulce accepted the dedication of Pirovano’s
_Defence of Astrology_. The science numbered eminent adepts. Luther
made use of it in support of his doctrines. Michel Servet, after vainly
trying theology and medicine, began to profess transcendental astrology;
he foretold eclipses, plagues, wars, and the deaths of potentates; he
achieved a very great success, pupils drank in his instruction. Unhappily
the jealous Faculty directed him to return to the natural sciences and
give up the “Almanac.” Servet then turned geographer, and it was not long
before he went back into the religious mêlée. The _Atlas of Astrologers_,
one of the most curious monuments of moral derangement, enumerates a
crowd of astrologers, among them the Sibyls of the Vatican and King
Alfonso of Naples.
[54]
Wing’d spirits, who the middle space
’Twixt earth and highest heaven possess,
God’s scouts, the outposts of his grace.
[55]
Unnumbered cords, frail strands full fraught with pain,
That join the soul to things of time and sense.
[56]
The body’s ruled by your command,
Like clay beneath the potter’s hand.
[57]
And this your will and pleasure, stars!
...
In vain doth man at eve and morn
Torment you with his useless prayer;
Fate sweeps him on, he knows not where,
As billows on the stream are borne.
[58] _Les Evangiles des quenouilles_ promise to a wife a son or a
daughter according as she loves battle stories or has longings for
dancing and music.
[59] One of the greatest ladies of the time, Marie de Luxembourg,
Countess of Vendôme, lived on an annual income of 16,000 livres.
[60] Book III.
[61] [“To the Mistletoe! the New Year!” The cry of Breton peasants,
“begging small presents or New-Year’s gifts, an ancient tearm of
rejoycing derived from the Druides, who were wont, the first day of
January, to go into the woods, where having sacrificed and banquetted
together, they gathered mistletow, esteeming it excellent to make beasts
fruitful, and most sovereign against all poyson” (Cotgrave). From a
patois corruption the Scots _Hogmanay_ is said to be derived.]
[62] She provided for so many maidens “by way of marriage, and had so
great care of them, that she deserved to be named their mother.”—_La
Vauguyon._
[63]
Quattuor sunt que mulieres summe cupiunt:
A formosis amari juvenibus,
Pollere filiis pluribus,
Ornari preciosis vestibus,
Et dominari pre ceteris in domibus.
—_Tractaculi sive opusculi._
[“Four things there are that women eagerly covet: to be loved by handsome
youths; to be good for many sons; to be decked out in costly array; and
to rule the roost.”]
[64] Montaigne relates that he was put out to nurse with peasants, “and
brought up in the humblest and most ordinary way of life.”
[65] Montaigne, Bk. II., cap. iii.
[66]
[Daughter and son gave her obedience,
Stored full of wit and virtue and good sense.]
[67] Maffeo Vegio, a disciple and the biographer of St. Bernardin of
Sienna, secretary of Pope Martin V., was a very eminent humanist at the
beginning of the 16th century. He added a supplementary book to the
_Aeneid_. He was ranked much higher than Petrarch. The book cited, _De
educatione liberorum et eorum claris moribus_, often republished since
1491 and issued in a French translation in 1508, is a very remarkable
work, and exercised a great influence. It seems, however, to have escaped
the researches of the historians of education.
[68] [Jean Lemaire de Belges (1475-1548), historian and poet. His chief
works quoted from in these pages are: _Illustrations et singularités des
Gaules_ and _Le Temple d’honneur et de vertus_.]
[69] Montaigne.
[70] [A friend of Calvin, and a professor, who reduced himself to beggary
by his unselfish efforts to improve the educational methods of his day
(1479-1559).]
[71] [A cardinal, and an ardent humanist (1477-1547). He took Cicero for
his model, and wrote moral philosophy and poetry. The work here alluded
to is his _Paedotropia_.]
[72] [Vivès accompanied Catherine of Aragon to England as her tutor and
chaplain. Siding with her on the divorce question, he had to leave the
country. His works were published at Basle in 1555.]
[73] He admits astrology among the exact sciences.
[74] [Ulrich von Hütten (1488-1523), friend of Luther and one of the
most energetic of the Reformers, by turns soldier, poet, theologian, and
politician. He is alluded to _passim_.]
[75] _Heptameron_, Tale 18.
[76] [A 16th century scholar who in an amusing book called _Apologie pour
Hérodote_ made an elaborate attack on the clergy of his day.]
[77] “My pupils do just as they please; most of the time they are digging
the soil,” writes an unlucky tutor, referring to the dauphin of France;
“I have grave doubts whether they’ll be fit for anything better.”
[78] Numerous Latin dialogues were written for children in France and
Germany.
[79] Montaigne.
[80] “My daughter is of the age wherein the laws excuse the forwardest to
marry. She is of a slow, nice, and mild complexion, and hath accordingly
been brought up by her mother in a retired and particular manner, so that
she beginneth but now to put off childish simplicity.” (Montaigne.)
[81]
Quid tibi praecipiam molles vitare fenestras?
Ad culpas aditum laxa fenestra facit.
Libera mens, captiva tamen sint lumina, quando
Hanc animo invenit saeva libido viam.
Cogite fallaceis, animus ne peccet, ocellos,
Cogite, libertas ne peritura cadat.
Pellite materiam, primasque extinguite flammas.
(Pontanus, _De Liberis_.)
[“Why should I admonish thee to shun the seduction of windows? An
unbolted casement is the door to vice. Keep the mind free, but the eyes
in durance, since concupiscence discovers this way to the soul. Restrain
thy eyes from tricks lest thy soul sin; yea, lest thy liberty fall and
perish. Thrust away the fuel, and extinguish the beginnings of flame.”]
[82] [A disciple of Thomas Aquinas: he died in 1316.]
[83] [The famous mystic and theologian (1363-1429), who so stoutly
opposed scholasticism, astrology and magic. The _Imitation of Christ_ has
been ascribed to him.]
[84] “Take care of your daughters; let them be always at home, gentle,
pious, scorning money and outward adornments. And thus you will preserve
not only these young girls, but the men who will one day wed them, and
you will assure a good posterity from a healthy stock.”
[85] “From a braying mule and a girl who speaks Latin, good Lord, deliver
us.” (Bouchot.)
[86] It was to an expert in high culture that Renée of France entrusted
her daughters, in the person of Olympia Morata, who was noted for the
eloquent Latin and Greek discourses she delivered as a precocious
child of thirteen. While still under fifteen, Olympia’s pupils were
sufficiently advanced to act a comedy of Terence before the pope. This
education by means of the theatre was completed with serious readings in
Ovid and Cicero, and the final polish was given by a Greek monk of known
liberal views, Francesco Porto. There was no idleness or melancholy here.
[87] [An Italian poet, pupil of Pontanus (1488-1530). The _Arcadia_, his
chief poem, ran into sixty editions.]
[88] Montaigne (who, however, deduces from these premises altogether
different conclusions).
[89] “Let us retard the age of marriage,” cries M. Legouvé, “if we wish
girls to exercise free choice and live free lives.”
[90] [_Praeter naturam est, feminam in masculos habere imperium._
(Erasmus.) “’Tis against nature for a woman to have rule over males.”] “I
allow woman to learn; to teach, never.” (Bruno.)
[91] [A poet of Lyons, who lived about the middle of the sixteenth
century.]
[92] [One of the most active of the Italian humanists (1380-1459). He
brought many ancient MSS. to Rome, and translated Xenophon and other
Greek writers. His _conti_ are as obscene as some of Boccaccio’s.]
[93]
Nil est simplicitate prius.
Haec placet; haud ulla est quaesitae gratia formae,
Quae studio peccas, simplicitate places,
Nulla est ornandi, nulla est, mihi crede, parandi
Gloria, naturae est forma, nec artis opus;
Ars odio digna est, ubi nullo fine tenetur.
(Pontanus, _De amore conjugali_.)
[“Nothing comes before simplicity. That is pleasing; there is no grace
in artificial beauty. By artifice thou wilt err, by simplicity thou wilt
please. There is no glory in adornment, none, believe me, in farding
oneself; beauty is the work of nature, not of art. Art is hateful when
not kept within bounds.”]
[94] [A vigorous and witty social satirist (1421-1510).]
[95]
[Some maidens, in their modest way,
With fools their garters stake at play.]
[96] Nifo sincerely admires princesses who go to their husbands _virgines
intactae_.
[97] [A doctor of the Sorbonne and a Dominican (1443-1514). In one of
his sermons occurs the story of the church bells, repeated by Rabelais à
propos of the marriage of Panurge.]
[98]
[A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree,
The more you beat ’em, the better they be.]
[99] In the long run the best things become wearisome: men at last
believe they are sacrificing themselves. “Christ died only once for
His church; we die every day for our wives,” is the heartfelt cry of a
husband; to which a lady retorts: “Go to the wars, then, and lie for a
month on the bare ground; and you won’t be sorry to get back to your
good bed! Men only appreciate their comforts when they’ve lost them.”
(_Heptameron_, Tale 54.)
[100]
Femme bonne qui a mauvais mari
A souvent le cœur marry.
...
Femme aime tant comme elle peut,
Et homme comme il veut.
—_L. de Lincy._
[A good woman with a bad husband has often a sore heart.... Woman loves
as much as she can; man as much as he will.]
[101] A woman, irritated at her husband reading in bed, calls out to the
servant: “Ah well! Bring me my distaff!” (Billon, _Le Fort inexpugnable
de l’honneur du sexe féminin_).
[102] “He who loves not him by whom he is loved is regarded as a
homicide, and not merely a homicide, but a committer of sacrilege and a
thief.” (Champier, _De vraye Amour_).
[103]
Il se commence à soucyer
Et à chagrin s’associer.
Il plaint la teste, puis les dents,
Et a les oreilles pendans
Ne plus ne moins comme un lymier.
—_R. de Collérye._
[He begins to fume and fret,
Becomes sworn brother to regret;
Headache, toothache he bemoans,
Chapfallen he sighs and groans.]
[104] _Dialogus de matrimonia._
[105] “You have been to seek a little school-miss, an angel who dared
not lift her eyes, and who to all appearance was candour to the
finger-tips.... She was thinking things over: she was enticing you into
her trap, because your rank and fortune suited her, but determined at the
bottom of her soul to give you a ‘combing’ later: she says in confidence
to her friends, ‘randy steeds need breaking in’.” (Jean d’Ivry: _Les
Secretz et Loix de mariage_).
[106] [Title of a brilliant comedy by Emile Augier and Jules Sandeau,
produced in 1854. M. Poirier is a wealthy retired cloth merchant who has
married his daughter to a spendthrift marquis in the hope of getting a
peerage through his influence.]
[107] [Charles had been solemnly betrothed to the daughter of Maximilian
of Austria, and Anne of Brittany had been wedded by proxy to Maximilian
himself. Both repudiated their contracts, and their alliance united
Brittany to the crown of France.]
[108] Cf. the following ballad by Alione:
Qui veut ouir belle chanson
D’une fillette de Lyon
Qui d’amour fut requise,
Ale houe!
En venant de l’église.
Mais elle en fut reprise!
Ale houe!
Un bon copain lui voulut donner
Cent florins pour la marier,
Mais (_Pourvu_) qu’elle fût s’amie.
Ale houe!
Prenez-les, je vous prie;
De cœur les vous octroie.
Ale houe!
A sa mère s’en conseilla,
Qui lui dit que bien la gardera
De cette maladie.
Ale houe!
Il peut bien dire pie,
Car il ne l’aura mie.
Ale houe!
“Les amoureux du temps présent
Font des promesses largement,
Et montrent main garnie.
Ale houe!
Mais folle est qui s’y fie:
Trop coûte la folie!
Ale houe!”
La fillette ne voulut pas
Son conseil croire, en celui cas;
Car elle eut plus grant joie,
Ale houe!
De gagner sa monnaie,
Cent florins de Savoie.
Ale houe!
Cent florins sont beaux et luisants;
S’elle eust fillé vint et cincq ans,
Voire toute sa vie,
Ale houe!
Toute sa fillerie
N’en vaudrait la moitié.
Ale houe!
[Who lists to hear a famous ditty
All on a maid of Lyons city,
Who as she came from church one day
(Hey nonny!)
Was sought in love the usual way—
And sore she smarted, gossips say—
(Hey nonny!)
The jolly youth would give, he said,
A hundred florins her to wed
If she would first his leman be.
(Hey nonny!)
“Prithee, take them, dear,” says he,
“With all my heart I give them thee.”
(Hey nonny!)
The hussy home did straight repair:
Her mother counselled her: “Beware!
Lest it repent thee by and by;
(Hey nonny!)
For though he speak thee fair and sigh,
His precious gold is all my eye!
(Hey nonny!)
“The young men of the present day,
Promise more largely than they pay,
And though their purse well filled appear,
(Hey nonny!)
The girl who trusts to it, I fear,
Will find her folly cost her dear.”
(Hey nonny!)
Alack! the hussy tossed her head,
Heedless of what her mother said,
For ’twas to her a greater joy
(Hey nonny!)
To get the money from her boy—
Those hundred florins of Savoy.
(Hey nonny!)
A hundred! how they gleamed and shone!
Had she sat spinning on and on
Full twenty year, till worn and old,
(Hey nonny!)
Not all the thread she’d spun and sold
Had brought her half that shining gold.
(Hey nonny!)]
[109] One of the friends of Margaret of France, the worthy La Perrière,
thunders against marriages for money or beauty, which only end in putting
“a fox into a hermitage.”
[110] _Heptameron_, Tale 37.
[111] [See Book III. chapter iii.]
[112] Vittoria Colonna’s bed, preserved in the Pescara palace at Naples,
is extraordinarily wide.
[113] A lady of Florence, Alessandra Bardi, on learning of the sudden
death of one of her sons, wrote to another the following beautiful
letter, so touching in its resignation: “My sweet son, I have learnt how,
on the 23rd of last month, it pleased Him who gave me Matteo to recall
him to Himself, in complete consciousness, in full possession of grace,
with all the sacraments necessary to a good and faithful Christian.
I have felt the bitterest grief at being deprived of such a son, and
methinks his death has done me great affliction apart from filial love,
and likewise to you two, my sons, now reduced to so small a band. I
praise and bless the Lord for all that is His will” (Müntz, _History of
the Renaissance_, i. 18).
[114] The story is given in Nifo’s _De Amore_, cap. cii.
[115] [Sister of Henry VIII. She was Louis’ third wife: he was in his
decrepitude, and died three months after the marriage. She at once
married the handsome Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who had escorted
her to France.]
[116] The diplomatic agent of Mantua thus reports his visit of condolence
to the Duchess of Urbino: “I found her in her room among her ladies,
all in black, the shutters closed, the apartment lighted by a single
torch placed on the floor. She was seated on a cushion, a black veil on
her head, and wore a high-necked dress, or at any rate her bosom was
covered with a veil as high as her chin.... She held out her hand and
burst into tears; a moment passed before her sobs and mine permitted us
to speak. I handed her your lordship’s letter, and dispatched my visit,
my condolences, and my attempts at solace in a few words, so as not
to prolong her grief. I imparted to her also the recommendations and
offers with which I was charged by my most illustrious lord. Both were
well received.” Then they talked of Mantua and the Gonzaga family: the
Duchess kept the ambassador for more than two hours. Next day, there was
another visit of three hours; this time, her spirit got the upper hand,
an interesting discussion ensued, and the ambassador succeeded in making
her laugh.
[117] Montaigne, bk. ii. cap. xxxv. He himself desires no tears, no
funeral oration: “I renounce henceforth the favourable testimonies men
may will to give me, not because I am worthy of them, but because I am
dead.”
[118] June 8, 1508. Sisters Domicella and Elena, from Forli, to Catherine
Sforza.
[119] [Daughter of Maximilian of Austria, and regent of the Netherlands.
She was affianced as a child to the Dauphin of France (Charles VIII.),
then married to the Infant of Spain, who died in a few months: finally
at the age of twenty-one married Philibert of Savoy, who died after four
happy years of wedlock. She was a great patroness of agriculture and the
arts, and a poetess.]
[120] She herself, however, employed on occasion the most convincing
arguments. She had confiscated the jewels of her cousin, the Countess of
Montpensier, who was regarded as rather too hot-headed for a widow, and
she refused to restore them to her.
[121] The _Fifteen Joys of Marriage_ include among domestic calamities to
return from war after a long captivity and to find one’s wife wearing the
finery of a new lord and master.
[122] “There’s no man will have you!” is an insult flung by a peasant at
a woman during a squabble.
[123] “Be obedient to your mother, show her honour and reverence, and
take care to please her in everything you can, as is her due, as much
because it is God’s commandment as that I know she merits it, and that
you ought so to do if you wish to succeed, for having known her, I know
that she will advise you so well that you will be therewith content”
(Instructions of a Duke of Nemours to his sons).
[124] Ruskin.
[125] Ruskin’s favourite theory.
[126] [Minister of finance to Francis I., a faithful and honourable
servant of the crown. Lautrec, governor of Milan, having asked for
400,000 crowns as arrears of pay for his troops, the queen-mother, Louise
of Savoy, who had a grudge against him, seized all the money in the
treasury on the pretext that it was owing to her, and even intercepted
what little coin Semblançay was able to get together. The result was that
Lautrec’s army melted away and Milan was lost. Louise made Semblançay
the scapegoat, and when Francis, after his defeat at Pavia, was carried
a prisoner to Spain, she threw Semblançay (he was 72 years old) into the
Bastille, had him tried on trumped-up charges, and brought about his
execution.]
[127] [Bohier was a jurisconsult, Briçonnet, bishop of Lodève and Meaux,
and an insincere persecutor of the Reformers; Robertet was treasurer of
France under Louis XII. and Francis I.; and Duprat a venal minister of
Francis I. and a partisan of Louise of Savoy.]
[128] Coquillart.
[129] “Have you never reflected, then,” says an old author, “what this
smoke is worth?” (Baltazar Gracian).
[130] [Italian poet and historian (1426-1503), the most ‘elegant’ writer
of the sixteenth century. He wrote _Amorum libri ii._, on conjugal love.]
[131] _Heptameron_, Tale 51.
[132] Gallants, ambitious men, fashionable men late abed and late up,
those who live on credit, litigious fellows, spendthrifts, poor devils
who marry for love without a penny, loafers, philosophers who live from
hand to mouth, soldiers who run through a quarter’s pay in a month,
husbands ruined by their wives’ dressmakers’ bills or their servants’
guzzling, men who keep no accounts, who, without being princes or lords,
put eighteen yards of velvet into one costume, who spend much and get
little, who let their horses starve, their tapestries and furniture
moulder, who leave their orchards to be robbed, who would not spend a
penny but fling away a shilling, who endow their daughters too largely,
who toil without rhyme or reason, who accept financial responsibilities
... weak-kneed men who back out of their lawsuits, who are led by the
nose by those about them, who are always singing a _gaudeamus_ and never
a _requiem_, braggarts, giddypates, boasters, “Roger Goodfellows,”
gormandisers, debauchees.
[133] [George of Amboise, the wealthy Archbishop of Rouen: a great
builder and art-patron, who brought many painters and sculptors and
architects into France from Italy. When he died Pope Julius II. “thanked
God he was now Pope alone”! The cardinal’s tomb in Rouen Cathedral is one
of the finest pieces of Renaissance work in France.]
[134] Which included, we may say in passing, music and gymnastics.
[135] But he did not mean to be absorbed by either the one or the other.
[136]
To love money
Save for its use, is rank idolatry.
[137]
They have what pleasures they desire,
Honours whereto they dare aspire,
And wealth much more than they require.
[138] Almanque Papillon’s _La Victoire et Triomphe d’argent_ (Lyons,
1537). A copy belonging to Baron Pichon includes two miniatures: (1)
the Triumph of Money, (2) the Triumph of Honour and Love, represented
by Francis I. in a car drawn by two unicorns, and led by Diligence,
Sapience, Sobriety and Virtue.
[139] _Imitation of Christ_, book iii., chap. v.
[140] [Italian scholastic philosopher (1453-1538). His lectures attracted
lords and ladies who came to laugh at his ugly grimaces and ungainly
antics, and at his amusing anecdotes and witticisms. His works include
treatises on Beauty, on Love, _De Principe_, etc.]
[141] [The leading Italian humanist (1433-1499); the first professor
in Cosimo de’ Medici’s Florentine Academy. He translated Plato under
Cosimo’s auspices].
[142] [A prodigy of learning who wasted his energies in attempting to
reconcile theology and philosophy, and died young. He knew twenty-two
languages].
[143] [An illegitimate scion of the house of the Sanseverini (1425-1477).
He founded an academy for the study of antiquity, and pushed his
enthusiasm so far as to worship at an altar erected to Romulus, and to
roam the streets garbed as Diogenes].
[144] So that nothing should be wanting, a Diogenes started running about
the streets with his lantern and his tattered cloak (Paul Jove).
[145] Erasmus archly observes: “When Plato appeared uncertain whether to
set woman among rational animals or among the brutes, he did not mean
that woman is merely an animal; he merely intended to point out the
stupidity of this charming animal.”
[146] To this day this theory of two loves is commonly attributed to
Plato, even in philosophical treatises.
[147] His ardent oration has been reported in the _Courtier_ of
Castiglione, which became the breviary of the new society; we know that
Castiglione faithfully reproduced his words, and, for greater accuracy,
first submitted the manuscript to Bembo. [It may be as well to state that
the passage quoted here is not a continuous quotation, but an admirable
condensation of several pages of Castiglione. See pp. 343-363 of Hoby’s
translation in Mr. Henley’s “Tudor Translations.”]
[148] Sonnet viii.
[149] Sonnet lii.
[150] Distinguished as she necessarily was, the lady who inspired such
accents had herself nothing so tragic or so sublime. She wrote:
Amor, tu sai, che mai non torsi il piede
Dal carcer tuo soave, nè disciolsi
Dal dolce giogo il collo, nè ti tolsi
Quanto dal primo dì l’alma ti diede.
Tempo non cangiò mai l’antica fede;
Il nodo è stretto anchor, com’io l’avvolsi;
Nè per il frutto amar, ch’ognihor ne colsi,
L’alta cagion men cara al cor mi riede.
Visto hai quanto in un petto fido, ardente
Può oprar quel caro tuo più acuto dardo,
Contro del cui poter Morte non valse,
Fa homai da te, che’l nodo si rallente,
Che a me di libertà già mai nol calse,
Anzi di ricovrarla hor mi par tardo.
[Thou knowest, Love, I never sought to flee
From thy sweet prison, nor impatient threw
Thy dear yoke from my neck; never withdrew
What, that first day, my soul bestowed on thee.
Time hath not changed love’s ancient surety;
The knot is still as firm; and though there grew
Moment by moment fruit bitter as rue,
Yet the fair tree remains as dear to me.
And thou hast seen how that keen shaft of thine,
’Gainst which the might of Death himself is vain,
Smote on one ardent, faithful breast full sore.
Now loose the cords that fast my soul entwine,
For though of freedom ne’er I reck’d before,
Yet now I yearn my freedom to regain.]
[151] “Ye women who glory in your ornaments, your hair, your hands, I
tell you you are all ugly. Would you see the true beauty? Look at the
pious man or woman in whom spirit dominates matter: watch him, say, when
he prays, when a ray of the divine beauty glows upon him, when his prayer
is ended; you will see the beauty of God shining in his face, you will
behold it as it were the face of an angel.” (_28th Sermon on Ezekiel_).
[152] “Monsieur, si vous estiez aseuré de la prudence et discrétion que
vous dictes estre en moy, vous ne prendriez peine de m’escripre courte ne
longue lettre, car ou deux telles vertuz consistent, une n’a lieu: qui
servira de briefve response à tout ce que m’escripvez. De mon vouloir,
il est tel, sans jamais changer propos, que je seray telle que je doibz
estre, et que ne m’estimez estre si bonne par vostre lettre; ouy bien
autant qu’il me sera possible, et quelque jeune d’aage que je soye, si
cognois je bien que en suyvant ces deux devant dictes vertuz, l’on ne
se peult desvoyer. Quant à l’audience que me demandez, je ne puis, et
ne veulx; et, sans plus m’escripre, à Dieu prenez en gré et ne vous
desplaise.” (_La Fleur de toutes joyeusetez_).
[Here is the letter of a woman of the old style: “Sir, if you were
assured of the prudence and discretion you say are in me, you would not
waste your time writing letters, whether long or short, for where two
such virtues are conjoined, a letter is but vain: which will serve as a
brief response to all you write to me. My will is such that I am firmly
resolved to be good, as I ought to be, though from your letter you do not
think I am; ay, so far as lies in my power: and though I may be young in
years, yet know I well that in seeking after the two aforesaid virtues
one cannot go astray. As to the interview you ask of me, I cannot and I
will not; and, without writing further, I pray God you may take it in
good part and not be huffed.”]
[153]
La Françoise est entière et sans rompeure:
Plaisir la meine: au proffit ne regarde.
Conclusion: qui en parle ou brocarde,
Françoises sont chef-d’œuvre de nature ...
Pour le desduict (_le plaisir_).
—Marot, _Rondeau 13_.
[Our ladies flawless are and all complete:
’Tis pleasure leads them; they look not for gain:
Conclusion: men will talk and scoff in vain,
For pleasure they are Nature’s master-feat.]
[154] Cornelius Agrippa furnishes a curious piece of evidence on this
point. Disgraced by Louise of Savoy, he asked himself what had caused the
princess’s hatred. While pondering the matter he mechanically opened his
Bible and lit upon the passage where Ahab says in regard to the prophet
Micaiah, “I hate him, because he doth not prophesy good concerning me.”
“That’s my very own case,” cries Agrippa, and remembers that one day
he had foretold a victory for M. de Bourbon. What victory?—he did not
say, and for good reasons: but that was enough. So he takes his pen, and
writes a long address to prove that he is not, has not been, and will not
be of the Bourbon party, in spite of the overtures made to him. He got
nothing by his prose; some time afterwards Bourbon was killed at Rome,
and, adds Agrippa, “Jezebel possesses his vineyard. The angel of the Lord
has warned me and saved me from the evil woman. Nothing remains but to
fling Jezebel headlong and give her carcase to the dogs.”
[155]
Awaiting thus the seasonable hour
For justice or for God to interpose with power.
[156] _L’aisnée Fille de fortune._ [“If she had a little of that, she
would be the most accomplished lady God ever gave life to.”]
[157] La Vauguyon describes with emotion the sorrow of her servants and
vassals: “What will become of us now?... Death has seized our mother.”
[158]
Bonnet entendoit la magie
Aussi bien que l’astrologie:
Bonnet le futur prédisoit,
Et de tout présages faisoit....
Bonnet sçeut la langue hébraïque
Aussi bien que la caldaïque;
Mais en latin le bon abbé
N’y entendoit ny A ny B.
Bonnet avoit mis en usage
Un barragouin de langage
Entremeslé d’italien,
De françois et ... savoysien.
Bonnet fut de l’Académie,
De ceux qui souflent l’alchumie.
—Du Bellay, _Epitaphe de l’abbé Bonnet_.
[Bonnet knew astrology
As well as demonology.
Bonnet the future could foretell
And cast your horoscope as well.
Bonnet knew the Hebrew tongue,
And in Chaldee spake and sung,
But, good soul, in Latin he
Could not say his A B C.
Bonnet used with good intention
A jargon of his own invention—
Words from France he would employ,
From Italy and from—Savoy.
And in academic state
Of alchemy Bonnet would prate.]
[159] Montaigne, bk. iii. cap. x.
[160] A naïve French poet, with the words ‘grace’ and ‘hope’ ever on
his lips, somewhat scornfully depicts the French court guarded military
fashion by two Italians, Pasquil and Aretino, whom he styles Bohemians of
sinister aspect. ‘Diligence’ and ‘Bon Vouloir,’ old deities of the past,
had much difficulty in approaching. “Noble Cœur,” says a poet, “found his
‘temporal joy’ in chatting with and serving ladies; Nature encourages
Noblesse-Féminine to rule men, who include good and bad. In a delightful
garden the tree of Humanity flourishes; this splits into two equal
branches, that is, between the two sexes ‘one in being, one in substance,
one in dignity,’ and differentiated only by accident. Vilain-Cœur and
Malebouche have long been devising mischief against Noblesse-Féminine;
at the instigation of Nature, Noble-Cœur at length arms himself in her
defence.”
[161] [In reference to the group of seven literary men who banded
themselves together to reform and classicise the French language and
literature. Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Baïf were three members of the
Pléiade who reappear in the following pages. But as the manifesto of
this coterie was issued in 1549, the year of Margaret’s death, the name
Pléiade is anticipated for the literary court she maintained, the most
notable members of which were Marot and Bonaventure des Périers.]
[162] Margaret to the King, 1534.
[Ah, with what error Dante’s head is crowned,
Who comes to paint his Passion, antique tale,
And with his gloomy Hell our souls astound.]
[163] _Heptameron_, Tale 40.
[164] [French admiral (1488-1525), who after the defeat at Pavia
deliberately threw his life away. He rivalled Francis I. in gallantry,
paid sedulous court to Margaret, and is said to have been the luckless
(and well-scratched) hero of the nocturnal escapade described in the 4th
Tale of the _Heptameron_.]
[165]
[Loves like little budding flowers,
Loves to sweeten idle hours,
Likewise old amours.]
[166]
Amoureux suis d’une paintresse,
Qui est belle en perfection.
Son geste plein d’affection
La fait juger demie princesse.
—_Gilles d’Aurigny._
[I adore a painter dear,
Perfect grace and beauty she,
And her loving ways to me
Make her half princess appear.]
[167] _Heptameron_, Tale 18.
[168] _Ibid._, Tale 58.
[169] _Heptameron_, Tale 14.
[170] [Poet and translator (1493-1545), friend of Aretino. He wrote
‘amorous discourses’ in imitation of Boccaccio; comedies in imitation of
Plautus; a translation of the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius; and a prose work
on the beauty of women.]
[171]
Son âge estoit d’envyron les quinze ans,
Qui est le temps que désirent amans.
La taille en fut longue, menue et droicte,
Espaulle platte, et par les flancs estroicte.
(Anne de Graville.)
Toutes les nuyctz, je ne pense qu’en celle
Qui a le corps plus gent qu’une pucelle.
(Marot.)
[Her age was fifteen, as I guessed,
The age that pleases lovers best;
Her figure long, slim, straight as arrow,
Her shoulders broad, her haunches narrow.]
[I lie awake o’ nights, and my thoughts are sure to go
To the maid whose body’s comelier than any maid’s I know.]
[172]
Is she plump, or is she lean?
My pleasure is the same, I ween.
[173] [Both these ladies were mistresses of Francis I.]
[174] [A poet (1463-1537) who having lost his all in the sack of Rome was
succoured by Bembo. He wrote sonnets and pastorals.]
[175] [The French Baedeker.]
[176] Castiglione, _Courtier_ [(Tudor Translations, pp. 212, 213.)]
[177] Castiglione, _ibid._, p. 166.
[178]
“Thy shape! Ah, lady! ’tis to me well known
Through him whose soul is thine, no more his own.”
[179] [Jean Clouet (1485-1545), painter to Francis I.: Janet was his pet
name at court. The reference is to Ronsard’s lines—
Peins-moy, Janet, peins-moy, je t’en supplie,
Sur ce tableau les beautés de ma mie.]
[180] [A master in portraiture in enamel (1505-1575.) As many as 1840 of
his works are known, all signed. Specimens may be seen in the Louvre.]
[181] [Sculptor to Francis I., born 1515, killed in the St. Bartholomew
massacre, Aug. 24, 1572. His statue of Diana adorned the front of Diana
of Poitiers’ palatial château of Anet. Diana is represented nude,
reclining upon a stag, with a bow in her hand, and surrounded by dogs.]
[182] [The _blason_ was a short poem celebrating a single feature, or
some small possession of a lady—an eyebrow, a rose, or a jewel, for
instance.]
[183] This portrait, painted by an Italian, no longer exists, but an
excellent miniature copy, executed in Henri IV.’s time, is to be found in
the rare manuscript known as the _Book of Hours of Catherine de’ Medici_.
The other miniatures in this manuscript are made after French portraits,
and do not admit of so extravagant an interpretation. Louise of Savoy is
represented as a widow, in the classical severe and ungainly costume.
[184] Night-dresses, by the way, were not yet in use.
[185] Tale 45.
[186] _Heptameron_, Tale 4.
[187]
Washed of her paint, of her vices bereft,
Body and soul there is nought of her left.
[188] [A painter of the Florentine school (died 1440) about whom nothing
is known but a treatise on painting discovered in 1820, and some frescoes
at Volaterra.]
[189] [Author of _Gli ornamenti delle donne_ (the ornaments of ladies),
published at Venice in 1574.]
[190] [A poetess of Lyons, author of some remarkable sonnets.]
[191]
For pleasure oft my black I wear,
More often than for woe or care.
[192] [Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, one of the most vigorous opponents
of the French king’s Italian expeditions. The surname “Il Moro” came from
his cognisance, a mulberry-tree.]
[193] Alione, in one of his farces, has related the amusing story of a
Lombard lady (and she was not the only one) who gave herself to a French
soldier passing through, on the mere promise of a dress of Venetian
velvet, and to whom the rogue afterwards sent six crowns, with the excuse
that an everyday dress was good enough for a casual lady.
[194]
This ring is old and out of date,
This ruby’s badly cut:
This girdle’s precious ugly—wait,
This casket’s silver, but
I wish for one of beaten gold—
[195] [Librarian to Cardinal Farnese (1529-1600), a great authority on
antiquities, especially coins; he spent the greater part of his modest
income on pictures and bronzes.]
[196] [Historian and member of the academy of Pomponius Laetus
(1421-1481). He was Vatican librarian under Sixtus IV., wrote a history
of the popes, and a curious work on hygiene entitled _Opusculum de
obsoniis ac honesta voluptate_—the work here referred to.]
[197] [Sebastian Brandt (1438-1521), jurisconsult and poet of Strasburg,
author of the famous _Ship of Fools_, referred to in subsequent pages.]
[198] On ordinary days, the household of Marie of Cleves easily disposed
of half a calf, a quarter of an ox, five or six sheep, and dozens of
fowls.
[199] “Gout,” cries Cardan, “is queen, gout is noble! She is a synthesis
of ills! She is discreet and courteous; she attacks only the showable
parts of the body. There is nothing hideous about her as about leprosy.
She purifies man and raises his moral worth, as all pain does, but more
than any other pain. Why is she the enemy of grand dinners, and of
midnight toil, and of all the charming occupations of mind and body?”
(_De malo medendi usu._) A German song was dedicated to her:
O Gout my goddess, Gout my queen,
What mortal wight but fears thee?
Earth, sea and sky have ever been
Thy subjects: Jove reveres thee.
O mighty goddess, hear the prayer
Of those that now implore thee:
Give peace to every gouty toe,
And grant to all who limping go
Freedom from pain, release from care,
And perfect health before thee.
(_Podagrae Laus._)
[200] Gout was very common. Louise of Savoy suffered from it.
[201] [A sort of farcical comedy.]
[202] [Jean Gast, Swiss Protestant theologian (died 1553): author of
_Convivalium sermonum liber, meris jocis ac salibus refertus_.]
[203] Entering a lady’s house, a man would kiss her hands; and to recall
to mind a first presentation the graceful formula frequently employed
was: “The first time I kissed her hands.”
[204] To civilise his dominions, Peter the Great required his subjects
of both sexes to learn dancing, and he directed the performance, like a
general directing manœuvres. He insisted on the gentlemen kissing the
ladies on the lips.
[205]
“Ou soit d’un baiser sec, ou d’un baiser humide,
D’un baiser court ou long, ou d’un baiser qui guide
L’âme dessuz la bouche et laisse trespasser
Le baiseur ...
Ou d’un baiser donné comme les colombelles.”
[Dry kiss or wet kiss,
Long kiss or short kiss—
Kiss that lures the kisser’s soul,
Leading him to sin and dole—
Kiss that seals the purest loves,
Innocent as kiss of doves.]
[206] [One of the earliest of French theologians who accepted the
Reformed faith, born in 1530. He wrote a tractate on dancing.]
[207] _Heptameron_, Tale 21.
[208] Bonaventure des Périers, Tale 114.
[209]
Templa pudicitiam maculant, ni rite peractis
Rebus abis: templi noxia saepe mora est.
(_De Liberis._)
[The temples stain thy modesty unless when service is over thou
departest: to delay in the temple is often hurtful.]
[210] _Heptameron_, Tale 42.
[211] Margaret of France.
All hail! ye gardens, mansions, Edens of delight,
Whose comeliness and beauty put your vices out of sight!
[212] See the frescoes in the Borromeo palace at Milan.
[213] [In allusion to the wreaths used at the ceremony of laureation.]
[214] [Anne de Montmorency, the coarse, violent Constable of France,
who mumbled his prayers and his orders to his men together, because, as
Brantôme says, “he was so conscientious that he always tried to combine
the two duties.”]
[215] “Most illustrious and excellent lady, most respected madam,” wrote
the countess of Forli to the duchess of Ferrara: “the credible accounts
and perfect information brought in by innumerable persons about the
extreme kindliness and rare munificence of your excellency, inspire me
with the boldness to address you in confidence. I know that the most
illustrious lord your spouse and your most illustrious ladyship adore
hunting and birds, and that you always have in abundance dogs of all
kinds, excellent, perfect. I beseech your excellency very earnestly that
you would deign to make me a very beautiful and very precious present,
namely, a pair of greyhounds, well trained and fleet-footed, for the deer
of the Campagna, which are very swift: a couple of good deer-hounds and
a couple of handsome pointers, so good that I may hope to say regarding
their exploits when they catch their quarry, ‘these are the dogs the most
illustrious duchess of Ferrara gave me.’ I know that your excellency will
not send me anything but what is really good.” She cordially recommends
to the duchess the falconer she is sending, to fetch the hounds, and
probably to choose them. (Letter of Catherine Sforza to the duchess of
Ferrara, 1481).
[216]
King Louis Twelfth had perfect pastimes three:
Triboulet first, then Chailly, lastly me.
The author has collected the various pieces, still unpublished, in which
these hounds and hawks of Louis are celebrated.
[217] [Professor of mathematics and philosophy at the Cardinal Lemoine
college at Paris (1455-1537): a broad-minded man, the quarry of a heresy
hunt: chosen by Francis I. as tutor to his son Charles.]
[218] [Architect and antiquary of Verona (1445-1525). He spent eight
years in France at the invitation of Louis XII., designing bridges and
buildings: he was afterwards one of the architects of St. Peter’s at
Rome.]
[219]
Kathin alloit bien montée a la chasse,
Portant espieu. Cupido la pourchasse
Avecques son arc, et luy dit: “Combatons,
Puisqu’ainsi est que nous avons bastons.”
Elle respond: “Amour, que penses tu?
Longtemps y a que je t’ay combatu
Sans estre armée: a présent, je le suis;
Retourne-t-en, et plus ne me poursuis,
Car seure je suis que tu seroys batu.”
(Michel d’Amboise.)
[Kitty well mounted to the hunt was hying,
Holding a spear; Dan Cupid her espying,
Loosing his bow, gave chase and caught her. Said he:
“Come let us fight, since both are armed and ready.”
Then answered she: “Love, art thou then so daring?
Long have I fought thee, weapon never bearing;
Now am I armed, turn, never more pursue me,
For I would beat thee, ere thou couldst undo me.”]
[220] _Ship of Fools_, sixth engraving. Critics almost always represent
epicurism in a boat.
[221] [A Franciscan friar (1440-1508) and a vigorous and racy preacher.
His sermons were larded with buffooneries.]
[222]
C’est a l’image saincte Jame
Ou se vont baigner ces femmes;
Et baignez, et estuvez, allez.
Bien servies vous y serez
De varletz, de chambrière,
De la dame bonne chère.
Allez tost, les baings sont prestz.
(_Les Cris de Paris._)
[To the image of St. James
Go for bathing these fair dames.
Haste ye, ladies, bathe and stew,
Maids and varlets wait for you,
Service good, delightful fare;
The baths are ready: speed ye there.]
[223] “A work, for our epoch, in which the use of mineral waters is so
common, very useful to physicians, but still more to all other persons,
and very entertaining.”
[224] For example, _Le Bain de St Barthélemy_: “A man of Feltre named
Petrarch, after an accident to his knee, having been attended by a
series of, I will not say bone-setters but, bone-breakers, experienced
the keenest anguish; a flux resulted: astringents and cold remedies were
applied; and an induration ensued, which compelled him always to walk
with a stick or a crutch. At the end of two years, he came to see me; I
prescribed the baths. They did him so much good that after a fortnight he
left for home without his crutch.” (_De Balneis_, 1563).
[225] Gregorovius gives in his _Lucretia Borgia_ an account of an
extremely free fête got up at Sienna for fair bathers, from which
husbands and brothers were excluded.
[226] Poggio.
[227] [The _balle à grelot_ was a hollow ball of metal containing
something that caused a jingle when the ball was moved or thrown—like our
horse-bells.]
[228]
So many books there are, my memory fails
To number or to name them; but to see
Their fair array’s a pleasant sight to me.
...
And as for fearing what they have inside,
’Tis a mere folly I may not abide.
...
I piled a pillar of them, and methought
It heaven and earth together brought.
[229] Lucretia Borgia took to Ferrara for her personal use only
beautifully decorated Books of Hours, a few devotional books, a manual of
history, a collection of songs, a Dante, and a small Petrarch.
[230] Especially Castiglione, who borrowed entire passages from Cicero.
A translation of the _De Officiis_ was published at Lyons on Feb. 11,
1493-94.
[231]
All this is excellent good lore,
And none of it locked in the cupboard.
[232] [Rheinauer (Latinised as Rhenanus), a famous German philologist, a
friend and correspondent of Erasmus.]
[233] The duchess of Orleans was so fond of them that her husband could
find no finer present to give her than the romance of _Troilus and
Cressida_, and one day she sent a messenger in hot haste after a lady of
the court who had borrowed a _Cleriadus_ and forgotten to return it—as
often happens.
[234] The reading of _Lancelot of the Lake_ inspired Dante, as is well
known, with the exquisite passage on Francesca da Rimini.
[235] [“In which there are divers relations of the deceptions of servants
towards their masters, and of pimps towards lovers, translated from
Italian into French.” Paris: 1527.]
[236] He had got it in the library of the Palace.
[237] A woodcut, thrice repeated in the _Illustrations des Gaules_ (1528)
represents France on a throne, with Ill-hap at her feet; on her right
is Noblesse, represented as a maiden playing a violin; on her left, the
People, depicted as a young man playing a guitar.
[238] National Gallery.
[239] So well interpreted by Giovanni Bellini in his _Girl Singing_ in
Hampton Court Palace.
[240] Charles VIII. was even obliged to threaten serious consequences in
order to secure the restitution of a singer and a lute-player who had
been enticed away when he passed through Florence.
[241] Ockeghem, it has been said, “breathes into his music the soul of
song, envelops it in a vigorous harmonic body, and clothes it with a fine
tissue of ingenious thematic developments, imitations more or less close
and more or less extended. One finds in his pieces, often in their inner
parts, phrases of great melodic beauty, and full of an extraordinary
sweetness and depth of expression. His harmonies are often enough
peculiar and archaic, but they are striking and rich. He also brings his
pieces to a close in a manner sometimes surprising and odd, but certainly
very interesting.” (R. Eitner.)
[242] _Harmony_, by Paul Veronese (fresco at Masera): _Parnassus_, the
_Crowning of the Virgin_, by Raphael (Vatican).
[243] Neapolitan proverb.
[244] Erasmus.
[245] In the Louvre.
[246] The Madrid museum possesses a magnificent portrait of him by
Raphael.
[247] He was born, like Leo, in 1470.
[248] An opera-ballet was got up in the open-air by Bergonza di Botta,
in his park at Tortona, on the occasion of the marriage of Isabella of
Aragon.
[249] At Metz, in 1502, the public violently interrupted and rendered
impossible the representation of one of the comedies of Terence which
were constantly played at Rome; the performance had to be postponed till
next day, when it was continued before a select audience, composed in
great part of clergy.
[250] _E.g._ The Mystery of the Passion; of the Three Gifts, played in
1509; of St. Andrew, played in 1512; of St. Barbara, and St. Eustache,
played in 1504.
[251] [_Pochades_]
[252] Lorenzo de’ Medici, Pico della Mirandola, Agnolo Dovizio da
Bibbiena, Bernardo Ruccellai [see George Eliot’s _Romola_], Machiavelli,
and others: it was a singular, incoherent, burlesque procession of
characters of all sorts and sizes—devils, deaths, nymphs, courtiers, old
husbands, young wives, merry nuns, hunters and huntresses, pages, winds,
furies.
[253] “With the tongue seven men are not a match for one woman” (Erasmus,
_Colloquies_).
[254] “He who keeps his mouth shut knows no care” (P. Meyer).
[255] _Heptameron_, Tale 10.
[256]
Beneath the broidered sheets we lay—
Sheets flashing with gems and gold—
And whiled the dreary hours away
With comfortable tales of old,
And converse debonair and gay.
[257] [One of the Urbino coterie.]
[258] [A lawyer of Poitiers who is said to have composed a hundred
thousand verses, mostly dull. He called himself _Le Traverseur des
voies périlleuses_ (the traverser of perilous ways), and wrote moral
and familiar letters and _Les Regnars_ (foxes) _traversant les voies
périlleuses_.]
[259] [The brilliant Bishop of Orleans (1802-1878), noted equally for his
eloquence, his pugnacity, and the huge blue umbrella he carried on sunny
days. It was said of him that he was “a journalist who had strayed into a
bishopric.” He wrote _Letters on the Education of Girls_, and especially
opposed the opening of university courses to girls: he did not wish them
to go “from the bosom of the Church to the arms of the University.”]
[260] He adds: “We gambled, played music, took walks, supped, and worked
(not often that): no cares, no anxieties! We were often with the Venetian
nobles: my life flourished like a growing plant. Nothing could be more
pleasant than that life, which lasted five years and a half (September,
1526-February, 1532): we used to chat with the prefect, whose palace was
our kingdom and rostrum.”
[261] Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione in the Louvre.
[262] Like the good curé who, seeing a lady shedding hot tears at the
conclusion of a superb _exaltet_, charitably approached her to console
her for what he believed to be the effect of the music, and stopped
aghast when the good dame replied, “Ah! I fancied I heard my poor dead
donkey!”
[263]
O liberté aujourd’hui clairsemée
Et cher vendue, on te doit bien servir,
Car en tous lieux souvent est réclamée.
(Alione.)
[O liberty, to-day so rare
And dear sold, we must serve thee well,
For thou art asked for everywhere.]
[264] Here is an example: “Why, Dagoucin,” says Simontaut, “don’t you
yet know that women have neither love nor regret?”—“I don’t yet know
it,” he replies, “for I have never dared try for their love, for fear of
finding less than I hope for.”—“You live on faith and hope, then,” says
Nomerfide, “as the plover lives on wind? You are very easy to feed.”
(_Heptameron_, Tale 32.)
[265] “When women confess, they always tell what they have not done.”
(Old Italian proverb.)
[266]
Rusticus est vere, qui turpia de muliere
Dicit, nam vere sumus omnes de muliere.
(_Facetus._)
[He is truly a boor who speaks ill of women, for verily we are all of
woman born.]
[267] _Heptameron_, Tale 62.
[268] [Filippo Beroaldo (1453-1505), professor of ancient literature at
Bologna, so learned that Pico della Mirandola called him the ‘Living
Library.’ His most curious work is _Declamatio ebriosi, scortatoris et
aleatoris_, in which three brothers, a drunkard, a lecher, and a dicer,
dispute among themselves which of them, being the most vicious, their
father will disinherit.]
[269] [Italian poet (1445-1515) attached to the court of Ludovico il Moro
at Milan. When Ludovico was captured by the French, Fregoso went into
seclusion and became known as the Friend of Solitude.]
[270] An attempt was made to revive this system in certain notable salons
of the 18th century. The rules for the _Lanturelus_ drawn up in Madame
Geoffrin’s salon included the obligation of being just, loyal, cheerful
and kindly; they forbade one to grow old, that is, to become peevish and
misanthropical. The sittings held under the direction of a “queen” were
divided into two parts, one devoted to song, poetry and _facéties_, the
other to philosophy.
[271]
But that I fear to shock beyond forgiveness
The soilless purity of your chaste ears.
[272] He used to amuse himself with a drunken impromptu-monger, a Roman
named Querno, whom he jestingly called Archipoeta. Querno says to him:
Archipoeta facit versus pro mille poetis.
[Arch-poet makes enough verses for a thousand poets]
Leo replies:
Et pro mille aliis Archipoeta bibit.
[And drinks enough for another thousand]
Archipoeta responds:
Porrige quod faciat mihi carmina docta, Falernum,
[Give me some Falernian, to inspire my song]
and Leo:
Hoc etiam enervat debilitatque pedes.
[That also renders your feet weak and shaky]
[273] [A clerical poet (1466-1502) who translated Ovid’s Epistles into
French.]
[274]
“De son cheval on fait une rosse,
Et de sa femme une catin.”
[Of one’s horse one makes a jade,
And of one’s wife a harlot.]
[275] _Heptameron_, Tale 52.
[276] Seventy-five letters of this princess have been collected by M.
Amante.
[277] [Mistress of Francis I.]
[278] Anne of Laval, for example, writes to her sister: “J’ay entendu
que Monsieur mon frère ce vante que à son retour j’auré ung petit
neveu. Plust a Dieu qui fust ainsi, d’aussi bon cueur que je le desire.
L’espérance que j’en ay me faict vous envoyer des poix en gousse, qui est
viande de femme grosse.”
[I have heard that my brother is boasting that on his return I shall have
a little nephew. God grant it may be so, of as good heart as I desire it.
The hope I have induces me to send you some peas in the pod, which is a
food for pregnant women.]
[279] Here are some samples of these private letters:
“Monsigneur, tant et si tres humblement que je puis a vostre bonne grace
me recommende.
Monsigneur, je vous suplie tres humblement croire que la créance que
remais a ce porteur n’est que la plus grande obaissence que james tres
humble fille ne servente vous saroit porter et coume la plus obligée de
ce monde.
Monsigneur, prie Dieu qui vous dont tres bonne et tres longue vie.
Voutre tres humble et tres obaissente fille,
Magdalene.
_Address_: Au Roy mon souverain seigneur.”
[My lord, as truly and as humbly as I can I commend myself to your good
favour.
My lord, I beg you very humbly to believe that the letter of credit I
confide to this carrier is only the greatest obedience that ever humblest
maid and servant could bear to you, and like the most dutiful in the
world.
My lord, I pray God to give you a very good and very long life.
Your very humble and very obedient daughter,
Magdalene.]
“Ma cousine, je n’ay point voullu que ce porteur soit passé par Chantilli
sans vous porter de mes laitres; je vous en usses plutost envoié, mes les
piteulses nouvelles qu’avons repsues de Hedin m’an onst engardé, car je
n’aime poinct a mander de mauvesses nouvelles, et en cete perte j’ay esté
tres esse d’entendre que Monsieur le conte de Villars vostre frere est
seulement prisonnir (_sic_) avecq tant d’onneur que je suis sure que vos
prieres luy onst beaucoup servi. Vous feres tant pour moy, ma cousine,
de croire que tout ce qui vous touchera que je ceray mervelleucement
esse qu’il soint anci hureulx comme vous le desires et moy anci ce que
je suplie de bien bon cueur Dieu et de vous donner bonne vie et longue
et a moy l’eur de vostre bonne grasse a laquelle de bien bon cueur me
recommande.
Vostre melieure cousine et amie,
Marguerite de France.
A ma cousine Madame la connestable [duc]esse de Montmorency.”
[My cousin, I would not let this carrier pass through Chantilly without
taking some letters from me for you. I should have written sooner, but
the dreadful news we have received from Hedin has prevented me, for I
do not care to send bad news, and in this loss I was very glad to hear
that the count of Villars your brother is only a prisoner, with so much
honour that I am sure your prayers have much profited him. You will do
so much for me, my cousin, as to believe that, in all that touches you,
I shall be wonderfully glad if all falls out as lucky as you desire, and
myself too, and I pray God so with all my heart, both to give you a good
and long life, and me the bliss of your good favour, to which with all my
heart I commend myself.
Your best cousin and friend,
Margaret of France.]
“Mon pere, je ne voulu leser aler se pourteur sans vous faire savoir de
mes nouvelles, lequeles sont bonnes, pour se que je aeudire souvan des
vostres qai me pabise (?) bien, car s’et au proufit du roy et a vostre
ouneur. Je prie Dieu vous i vouloyr tenir; je ne veus oblier a vous faire
mes reconmandasions bien fort voustre bonne grase.
Vostre bonne fille,
Marguerite.
A Monsieur le grant maistre.”
[My father, I would not allow this carrier to go without letting you have
news of me, which are good, because I have often had news of you which
please me, for ’tis to the profit of the king and your honour. I pray
that God will keep you in the same; I do not forget to commend myself
very earnestly to your good favour.
Your good daughter,
Margaret.]
“Mon pere, j’ay esté tres esse d’entendre par vostre cegretere presant
porteur du bon partement du Roy et du vostre et aucy que toutes les
afaires continuent de mieulx en mieulx; cant a cele conpagnie, la Royne
et monsieur ce portent tres bien, aucy faict tout le reste. Nous ne
fesons faute de prier bien Dieu tout les jours pour le Roy; après luy,
mon pere, je vous puis assurer que vous estes le prumier (_sic_) en mes
auraisons. Je vous prire (_sic_), mon pere, presanter mes tres humbles
recommandasions au Roy et me tenir en sa bonne grasse et an la vostre. A
laquelle de bien bon ceur me recommande, et prie Dieu vous donner bonne
vie et longue.
Vostre milieure figle et cousine,
Marguerite de France.
A mon pere, Monsieur le connestable.”
[My father, I was very glad to hear by your secretary the present bearer
of the good departure of the king and yourself, and also that affairs are
going better and better: as to this company, the queen and _monsieur_
(the king’s brother) are very well, as are all the rest. We do not
neglect to pray God every day for the king: after him, my father, I can
assure you that you are the first in my prayers. I beg you, my father, to
present my very humble greetings to the king and to keep me in his good
favour and in yours. To which with much love I commend myself, praying
God to give you good and long life.
Your best daughter and cousin,
Margaret of France.]
[280] [She came near perishing by shipwreck on her way to join her young
husband, the Infant of Spain, and composed her epitaph:
Ci-git Margot, la gente demoiselle,
Qu’eut deux maris, et si mourut pucelle.]
[281] She died in 1530, barely fifty years old.
[282] Her portrait is in the Louvre.
[283]
Friends, know that I have changed my dame;
Another holds me at her will,
In soul Renée, Renée her name.
(Renée = re-born: the pun cannot be translated.)
[284] “I fatti sono maschi, le parole femine.”
[285] Clément Marot writes:
Adieu le bal, adieu la dance!;
Adieu mesure, adieu cadence,
Tanbourins, aulboys, violons,
Puisqu’à la guerre nous allons ...
Adieu les regards gracieux,
Messagers des cœurs soucieux;
Adieu les profondes pensées,
Satisfaictes ou offensées;
Adieu les armonieux sons
De rondeaulx, dixains et chansons ...
Adieu la lettre, adieu le page!
(To the court ladies.)
[Farewell to dance, farewell to ball,
And cadenced measures, farewell all!
Fiddles, hautboys, tambourines,
For we go to warlike scenes.
Sweet looks from ladies’ eyes, that tell
How much they love us, fare ye well!
Farewell to meditation deep,
That gives us joy or mars our sleep;
Farewell to all harmonious strains
Of ballads, rondeaux, and dizains;
Letters and pages, all farewell!]
[286] National Gallery.
[287] _Ibid._
[288] The brilliant captain whose Memoirs or Commentaries, it is said,
were afterwards called the Soldier’s Bible by Henri IV.
[289] “Catherine, if you make the dance go thus, Atlas will find the
world a lighter burden,” exclaims a poet.
[290] Francis I. regarded this as Michelangelo’s masterpiece.
[291] Emile Trolliet, _La Vie silencieuse_.
The veil of flesh is rent; the spirit’s light
Pierces and routs the clinging mist of sense;
And Earth, this Virgin and this God beholding,
Learns what Love is, and worships Womankind.
[292] [The sovereign family of Rimini and Romania, a race of warriors and
cut-throats. Robert, commandant of the troops of Sixtus IV., was poisoned
by Riario in 1483.]
[293]
En cas d’amour, c’est trop peu d’une dame,
Car si un homme aime une honneste femme,
Et s’il ne peut à son aise l’avoir,
Il fait très bien d’autre accointance avoir.
(Melin de Saint-Gelais.)
[In case of love, one dame doth not suffice,
For if a man loveth one fair of fame,
And cannot have her at an easy price,
’Tis well for him to have another flame.]
[294] _Heptameron_, Tale 42.
[295] Coquillart.
[296] _Heptameron_, Tale 8.
[297] _Heptameron_, Tale 38.
[298] Nifo, _De Amore_, cap. xvi.: _De viro aulico_, Bk. I., caps.
xxx.-xxxiv.
[299] _Heptameron_, Tale 4.
[300] _Heptameron_, Tales 18 and 25.
[301] _Heptameron_, Tale 24.
[302] _Ibid._, Tale 50.
[303] _Ibid._, Tale 5.
[304] Calvin regards his co-workers as “playactors,” worthy of
bespattering with mud. “The future appals me,” he cries: “I dare not
think of it: unless the Lord descends from heaven, barbarism will engulf
us.” (Preface to the Geneva Catechism.)
[305] Aretino wrote placidly: “I have legitimated my dear girls in my
heart; no other ceremony is needed.”
[306] Natural children easily obtained recognition by the concession of
the right to bear arms, or their legitimation. In Italy, legitimation
was only a fiscal formality; Innocent VIII. gave his nephew the right of
granting it.
[307] The Grecised name of Otto Schwartzmann, German jurisconsult
(1571-1670).
[308] The “Pomeranian doctor” (1485-1558). He married Luther, and buried
him, and was one of his coadjutors in the translation of the Bible.
[309] Bernardino Ochino of Sienna (1487-1565). He was a monk, and for
three years general of the Capuchins, but turned Protestant and got
into hot water with the Church. He spent a few years in England at the
invitation of Cranmer. A man of rare independence of mind, his opinions
soon verged towards heresy, and his _Diologi_, in which he opposed the
doctrines of the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, and others, and
spoke in favour of polygamy, brought on him the displeasure and even
persecution of his co-religionists.
[310] “Difficiles aditu fugias in amore puellas.” (_Celtis_, _Quattuor
libri_.)
[311] _Heptameron_, Tale 30.
[312]
Souvienne-toy, regaignant ta raison,
Que ta maîtresse est de grande maison,
De noble sang, et non pas amusée
A dévider ou tourner la fusée;
Et que son œil, mais plutôt un soleil doré,
Et son esprit, des autres adoré,
Et ses cheveux, les liens de ta prise,
Sa belle main, à la victoire apprise,
Son ris, son chant, son parler et sa voix,
Méritent bien le mal que tu reçois.
(Ronsard.)
[Remember, when thou canst regain thy nous,
Thy mistress is of high and famous house,
Of noble blood, nor is she wont to play
At wheel and distaff all the livelong day.
Remember that her eye, a sun of gold,
Her mind, by other worshippers extolled,
Her hair, the bonds of thy captivity,
Her lovely hand, well trained to victory,
Her smile, her song, her speech, her gentle voice
Deserve that for thy smart thou shouldst rejoice.]
[313]
Et, si l’on dit que le privé toucher
Faict près du feu le tison approcher,
Je respondray: Il y ha ja longtemps
Que, si l’honneur, où tousjours je prétens,
N’eust en moy deu faire plus de demeure,
Un, que nommer je ne veux pour ceste heure,
Par les effors de sa langue diserte
Auroit plus tost tiré gaing de ma perte,
Que par baisers, ne par approchements
Qui de la chair ne sont qu’attouchemens.
Héroët (one of Margaret’s friends).
[And if one says the intimate caress
Is fire to tinder, then will I confess
That if the honour hitherto my pride
Within my soul no longer would abide,
Long, long ere now a man I will not name
(Lest at this hour it bring us both to shame),
Would by his tongue’s delicious eloquence
Have won his profit at my dear expense
Far speedier than by kiss or dalliance hot,
That titillates the flesh, and is forgot.]
[314] The ancient Valentinians went much farther, and maintained that it
is impossible to the witty to become corrupt, whatever their actions.
[315]
Qu’eust fait ce grec, si ceste image nue
Entre ses bras fust Vénus devenue?
Que suis-je lors, quand Louize me touche
Et, l’accollant, d’un long baiser me baise?
L’âme me part, et, mourant en cet aise,
Je la reprens ja fuiant en sa bouche.
[What would that Greek of old have done if in his clinging arms
His naked statue had become Venus with all her charms?
And when Louisa touches me, ah! what is then my bliss,
When all my body tingles with the thrill of her long kiss?
In that sweet agony I die, my soul then from me slips;
But I catch it as it passes ’twixt my lady’s burning lips.]
[316] There are some rather lively and amusing letters of Bibbiena. On
February 7, 1516, he wrote to the Marchioness of Mantua: “The compliments
your Excellency has been good enough to pay me on behalf of Isabella
have given me supreme pleasure, for I have always loved and still love
Isabella more than myself. I am wholly Isabella’s, body and soul; so
that, whether loving or not loving Isabella Mario, I am wholly hers, and
desire above all things in the world to be loved by her.”
[317] _Heptameron_, Tales 20, 25, 14.
[318] Here are specimens of Phausina’s talk, that Nifo found so
delightful. “Phausina,” said he, “since it befell me to love you, you
have become an Aurora, superb, resplendent! How happy it makes me!”—“Near
such a sun as you,” she replies, “ought I not to become the finest dawn
ever seen?”
“One day I asked her how it was that with her sixteen years and her charm
she could love an old fellow like me, reciprocity of love resulting
philosophically from a certain similarity.”—“True, we are different,” she
replied prettily, “yet we are wholly at one in the basis of our mutual
love” (she meant beauty of soul).
“Who is the true lover?” he said. “The idolater,” she replied, “is he who
adores the image and not the divinity; the false lover, he who loves the
face of a girl, but does not respect her modesty.”
“Phausina, how can you love a man with one foot in the grave?” “’Tis not
the dotard I love so warmly, but he whom neither age nor anything can
affect; he who, after his death, will come to life again.”
“One day I was teasing Phausina: to provoke her I said, ‘Come now.
Phausina, when you are quite old, do you think I shall still love you?’:
‘Why, of course,’ she said: ‘what you love in me will not grow old.
Petrarch loved Laura ardently, young, mature, living, dead: he saw no
mark of age, which nevertheless he might have earnestly desired, so
that he might enjoy her beauty without any suspicion.’ And I then asked
Phausina what would be the reward for such a love. ‘That you will not be
a liar when you shower your praises on me.’”
[319] “One day, among the group of girls, someone set the little problem
of guessing what gave me the greatest pleasure in my relations with
Phausina. One of them said it was to gaze at so pretty a woman, another
that her conversation was very sweet, another swore that in reality it
was because we wrangled so pleasantly, and that she knew it. Phausina
smiled and said: ‘We all know, my dear Nifo, that all those things go to
produce my pleasure: but my deepest satisfaction is to be able to enjoy
everything, frequently, freely, without fear of material seductions,
because of your age.’”
[320]
Ma dame, un jour, daigna tant s’abaisser,
Parlant à moy, de doucement me dire:
‘Je ne te veux, amy, rien escond[u]ire
Qui soit en moy, je te pry le penser.’
Et pour encor du tout récompenser
Mon triste cueur de l’enduré martire,
Sa blanche main hors du gand elle tire
Et me la tend pour la mener danser.
(Magny, p. 7.)
[My fair did condescend one day
Sweetly to speak to me, and say:
“My friend, nothing will I deny thee
Of all I have, come prithee, try me.”
And for to recompense my heart
For all its grievous dole and smart,
From out her glove she drew her lily hand,
To lead her forth to dance did then command.]
[321] “And you, Madam, if you succumb to the flesh, beat your breast,
for you do not shun temptation. Why do you stand at your window? why
chat with young men?... Why go to the ball and give yourself to so many
idle conversations? Shun temptation, and the devil will leave you in
peace. Resist him and he will flee from you!” Woman’s tongue is one of
the greatest of the devil’s instruments: “I did that because the devil
seduced me:” it is Eve over again: “The serpent beguiled me.” (Baraleta.)
[322] “Casta est quam nemo rogavit.”
[323]
The servant that is brisk and trusty
Becometh master ere he be rusty.
[324] _Heptameron_, Tale 40, and prologue of first day.
[325] “Most illustrious and wicked girl. When the terrible duchess
Elizabeth was alive, she made me her martyr and protomartyr; and you
perhaps, nay certainly, with your angel’s face and your serpent’s
heart, were her perfidious counsel to my detriment; and now look at me,
compelled by aid of medicine to support as best I can the miserable
remnant of a life thus exhausted. Through that pity which you know not,
either in life or in fiction, you will condescend to do me the favour to
send me a _baratollo_ or rather a little tree of _barbe di calcatrepuli_,
a specialty of Urbino, so that I may boast of once having had a prayer
granted by the flinty ladies of the house of Gonzaga. I do not commend
myself to your highness, not wishing to waste my words on the air. I only
pray Heaven to keep you long in health and happiness, so that you may
long make mincemeat (_macello_) of your servitors.—Your servant for life,
Unicus.”
[326] _Heptameron_, Tale 8.
[327] Tales 9, 10.
[328] One of the ladies replies tranquilly: “I should prefer all my life
long to see the bones of all my servitors in my room than to die for
them: for everything can be amended but death.” (_Heptameron_, Tale 32.)
[329]
“Je le sçay bien, mais point ne le veux croire,
Car je perdrois l’aise que j’ai reçeu.”
(Clément Marot.)
[I know it well, but will not it believe,
For I should lose the comfort I receive.]
[330] Hütten writes: “What shall I say of Samson, who while all but in
the arms of a woman received the inspiration of the Holy Ghost?... And of
Solomon, who had 300 queens and an infinite number of concubines, till
his death, and who nevertheless in the eyes of the divines passes for
saved? What is the inference? I am not stronger than Solomon, nor wiser,
and one must sometimes have a little joy. The doctors say ’tis necessary
to cure melancholy. Well, what do you say of these grave authors?
Ecclesiastes says: ‘There is nothing better than that a man should
rejoice in his own works.’ So I say to my love, with Solomon: ‘Thou hast
wounded my heart, my sister, my spouse, thou hast wounded my heart with
one of thy hairs. How fair is thy breast, my sister, my spouse! How much
better is thy breast than wine!’ and so on.”
[331] _Heptameron_, Tale 15.
[332] _Ibid._, Tale 18.
[333] _Ibid._, Tale 13 and end of First Day.
[334] [Referring to the fable of the Stork and the Fox, versified later
by La Fontaine. “The stork with his long neck could not pick up a bit.”]
[335]
Comes from divinity,
And its torment from our humanity.
[336] [Ninon was the celebrated courtesan who, without any great beauty,
retained her ascendancy over men through a long life (1616-1706).
She was well-born, wealthy and witty, and capricious in the bestowal
of her favours. She is the original of Clarisse in Mlle de Scudéry’s
interminable romance _Clélie_. Herself a writer and a lover of
literature, she left Voltaire 2000 francs to buy books.]
[337] [An ancient princely family of Rome which claimed descent from
Fabius Maximus the Dictator.]
[338] Panormita, who died in 1471, had already employed his muse in
lamenting departed courtesans; for example:
Hoc jacet ingenuae formae Catharina sepulcro;
Grata fuit multis scita puella procis, etc.
[In this tomb lies Catharine of noble beauty: pleasing was the fair girl
to many a wooer.]
[339] Women “may accept of our service unto a certain measure, and make
us honestly perceive how they disdain us not; for the law which enjoineth
them to abhor us, because we adore them, and to hate us forasmuch as we
love them, is doubtless very cruel.... A queen of our time said wittily
that to refuse men’s kind summons is a testimony of much weakness,
and an accusing of one’s own facility, and that an unattempted lady
could not vaunt of her chastity.... If rareness be in any thing worthy
estimation, it ought to be in this.” And again: “In my time, the pleasure
of reporting and blabbing what one hath done (a pleasure not much short
of the act itself in sweetness) was only allowed to such as had some
assured, trusty and singular friend; whereas nowadays the ordinary
entertainments and familiar discourses of meetings and at tables are the
boastings of favours received, graces obtained, and secret liberalities
of ladies. Verily it is too great an abjection and argueth a baseness of
heart, so fiercely to suffer those tender, dainty, delicious joys to be
persecuted, pelted and foraged by persons so ungrateful, so indiscreet,
and so giddy-headed.” (Montaigne, Bk. III., cap. v.)
[340] Vice was incredibly base and ignoble at the courts of Charles VIII.
and Louis XII. Ragged and loathsome wretches went everywhere in the train
of the court, to whom the princes gave alms on fête days.
[341]
[Nor will you find it hard to tell
On what fair morning this befell.]
[342]
[God hath sent you to this place
Like some miracle of grace,
That you may both have and hold
Our great sovreign’s heart of gold,
And that like a holy fire,
Purified in all desire
His affection light may shed,
By your true perfections fed.
Kings to mortal men below
God’s own form and image show.]
[343] [And you have won the whole great heart of France.]
[344]
[Shall I alone of all this age in France
Forbear to sing thy dread and puissant name,
Nor tell the glory of thy crescent flame,
Nor by some deathless rime thy praise enhance?]
[345] Some historians have maintained that the love of Henri II. for
Diana was purely platonic.
[346] As a prelate and an aspirant to the purple Bembo was tied to
celibacy; but he was only in the lower ranks of the clergy so far as
actual _orders_ were concerned.
[347] Before becoming pope Julius had shaved. It was during his
pontificate that the discussion waxed bitter. Clement VII. lent his name
to the tractate _Pro sacerdotum barbis_ of Piero.
[348] “Well may a piece of marble raise your titles as high as you list,
because you have repaired a piece of an old wall, or cleansed a common
ditch, but men of judgment will never do it.” (Montaigne, III. x.)
[349] In the Louvre.
[350]
The day thy sail dipped to the dancing brine,
And from our streaming eyes robbed sight of thine,
That fatal bark bore far from weeping France
The Muses erst who dwelt there—sad mischance!
And now Parnassus thrums a tuneless lyre,
And Helicon distils an ooze of mire;
Our laurel is all parched, our ivy sere,
Our song-birds stint their singing—thou not here!
[351]
Prince Françoys, veulx tu, comme seigneur
Supérieur, estre dominateur,
Prans pour faveur, par amour et mérite.
Celle qui est en florée verdeur,
Digne d’honneur, nommée Margarite.
[Prince Francis, if thou dost desire
To rule indeed as lord and sire,
For love and worth in favour set
Her who is filled with youthful fire,
Deserving honour, Margaret.]
[352] This is especially noticeable in her first work, _The Mirror of the
Soul_, which she modestly called the work of a woman “who had in herself
neither science nor knowledge.” Besides, she employed a good secretary.
[353] Another anecdote of the court of Urbino. A Bergamese peasant had
just entered the service of a nobleman. The princesses were told that
there had arrived a retainer of Cardinal Borgia, who was a fine musician,
a dancer, and a great oddity. They fetched him in, welcomed him, sat
him down among them, and lionised him with great respect. Unhappily the
good man spoke an indescribable jargon. The author of the trick made the
princesses believe that he was shamming the Lombard peasant for fun. The
scene lasted a rather long time, while those in the secret were splitting
their sides.
[354]
O main polye, main divine,
Main qui n’as ta pareille en terre,
Main qui tient la paix et la guerre ...
Main portant la clef pour fermer
Et ouvrir l’huys de bien aymer,
Main plaisante, main délicate,
Je n’oserois te dire ingrate.
Tu peulx blesser, tu peulx guérir,
Tu peulx faire vivre et mourir.
[O fair smooth hand, O hand divine,
Hand never match’d on earth before,
The arbiter of peace and war,
That bears the key to lock or loose
The door for happy lover’s use,
O pleasant hand and dainty, ne’er
To call thee thankless could I dare.
’Tis thine to wound and thine to heal,
And thine both life and death to deal.]
[355] The question has often been asked whether the _Heptameron_ is a
work of imagination, or whether it should be taken seriously. After
the labours of MM. de Montaiglon, Franck, and Gaston Pâris, to speak
only of the principal authorities, there can be no longer any doubt.
Margaret, like Castiglione, certifies in a general way the veracity of
her stories. She worked at this collection for several years, beginning
probably in 1545, and with so much care that in 1549, when she died,
she left it incomplete. The _Heptameron_ then is not a juvenile work,
but the testament of her court life and her philosophic career, and an
autobiography, since several anecdotes relate to her, her brother, and
her intimate friends. Moreover, among the large number of manuscripts she
left in her portfolios, Boistuau (another strange character, to judge
by his works!) chose this one to publish under the title of _History of
Fortunate Lovers_, with some touching up, and a few excisions he thought
it well to make in certain risky passages. This precaution gave offence,
and Margaret’s own daughter took care to get a new and authentic edition
published, two years later.
[356] So we identify “Simontault,” [one of the _raconteurs_ of the
_Heptameron_].
[357] Thus we identify “Nomerfide.”
[358] “Ennasuite.”
[359] Margaret excelled in artistic needlework. She made a piece of
tapestry, representing a high mass as perfectly as a picture could have
done. While she plied her needle, she had near her someone to read to
her, or a historian, poet, or writer of some kind to talk to her.
[360] Very few poets had the audacity of Clément Marot, who, harassed by
his creditors, went a-begging to the Queen of Navarre, beslavering her
with love the while: she replied with a _dixain_. He acknowledged receipt
of it ironically, saying that on the strength of her verses his creditors
have called him “Monsieur,” and have permitted him to borrow again, which
he proceeded to do.
[361] “My heart’s friend, I beg you to send me the crucifix for a short
time, even if it is not far advanced, so that I may show it to the
gentlemen of the Most Reverend Cardinal of Mantua. And if you are not
very busy to-day, come and talk to me at any hour that suits you.—Yours
to command, the Marchioness of Pescara.”
[362] [Usually known as Lydius Cattus. His Latin poems in praise of Lydia
appeared at Venice in 1502.]
[363] [A Portuguese writer (1505-1566) who spent the most of his life
in France and taught philosophy at Paris. He is chiefly notable for his
crushing reply to Ramus’s attacks on Aristotle.]
[364] Paul Bourget, address in the French Academy, Dec. 9, 1897.
[365] He undertook to write for her the _Annals of Brittany_, and had an
idea of a history of the Greeks and Turks for the same princess.
[366] [So called because their aim was to purify the Italian tongue by
sifting the wheat from the chaff.]
[367] Castiglione got Bembo to revise the speeches he attributed to him.
[368] The Spanish _canzone_, inserted by Lucretia Borgia in her letters
to Bembo, are perhaps not her own.
[369] [Her librarian.]
[370] Castiglione, that arbiter of taste, devotes six pages of excellent
Latin distiches to dissuade his lady from going to the sea-baths. He
gives a charming description of the sea monsters which advance towards
the girls, not only to fling them as food to the fishes, but to get them
into their embrace, and so on. “Let us go rather,” he sighs, “towards the
gentle river, in the thick shade, among the flowers. Perfumed, crowned
with our favourite colours, we will let the water lave thy snowy feet,
... the zephyr will lay bare thy marble flanks.... O, dear soul of mine,
the woodland gods will feel the sting of my love, the very water of
the river will boil with my flame: let no one know whither we bend our
steps! The crowd strips rocks and woods of their charm.... Let young
scatterbrains go to the sea. We will be mum about the place whereto we
are bound. And if on the billows thou hearest a murmur, ah! my love, at
once bury thy head in my breast!”
[371] Virgil was much out of fashion, though translations are
occasionally to be met with.
[372] [A poet of Mantua (1498-1560), writer of extremely free verse on
monks and women.]
[373] [_I.e._ the Doubtful.]
[374]
Young Maupas’ sparrow—he is dead, alack!
Fair maids, lament him.
A thing unfeathered save upon his back
Hath slain and rent him.
Ye know the rogue—that froward wight
Called Love hath done it out of spite,
For when the mistress ’scaped his arrow,
He turned about and slew the sparrow.
[375] [Lemaire de Belges wrote an elegiac poem on _L’amant vert_,
Margaret’s parrot. A charming poem with the title _Vert-Vert_ was written
by Gresset, a contemporary of Voltaire, recounting the burlesque story of
a parrot which had been the pet of a convent.]
[376]
Mon Dieu, quel plaisir c’estoit,
Quand Peloton se grattoit,
Faisant tinter sa sonnette,
Avec sa teste folette!
Quel plaisir, quand Peloton
Cheminoit sur un baston,
Ou, coifé d’un petit linge,
Assis comme un petit singe,
Se tenoit, mignardelet,
D’un maintien damoiselet!
Ou, sur les pieds de derrière,
Portant la pique guerrière,
Marchoit d’un front asseuré
Avec un pas mesuré.
[Gad, how pleasant ’twas to see
Fluffy scratching prettily,
Making with his silky pate
Toy-bells tintinnabulate!
And what fun to see him ride
On a hobby-horse astride,
Or, bedight in tiny cape,
Squatting like a little ape,
Posing like a proper squire,
Spruce and dainty in attire;
On hind legs erect, perchance,
Shouldering a martial lance,
Marching at a measured pace,
Full assurance in his face.]
[377] [The French adapter of _Sandford and Merton_, etc.; known as the
Friend of Children.]
[378] [Alluding to his forename Angelo.]
[379] In 1500, in the village of Auvilliers in Normandy, a girl of
fourteen named Jeanne la Fournette, as skilled in Latin as the parish
parson, sang the Tenebrae in church.
[380] “Verse is the clarion, prose the sword.” (L. Veuillot.)
[381] “Gli Italiani, col lor saper lettere, haver mostrato poco valer
nell’ arme, da un tempo in qua.” (Castiglione.) [The Italians, with their
knowledge of letters, have shown little worth in arms at any time.]
[382] [The popularity of the _Ship of Fools_ was partly due to its
admirable woodcuts, which are of quite extraordinary excellence, and much
more amusing than the text.]
[383] Hütten. Though he is joking, Hütten pretty faithfully represents
the opinions of a part of Germany, which did not perceive his sarcasm.
[384] [Verses by Héroët and La Borderie appeared in _Opuscules d’amour_,
Lyons, 1547. Héroët’s _Parfaite Amie_ is a lady who, having lost her
lover, is content to await a spiritual union in a better world. La
Borderie’s _Amie de Cour_ is a lady of quite contrary proclivities.]
[385] In 1546 Delahaye, sometime printer of Alençon, now blossomed into
‘Silvius,’ could praise Margaret for the service she had just rendered
to the French mind: A coarse Cupid, he said, was reigning when true
Love descended from heaven to chase him away, found hostelry with the
princess, and “gently settled upon a hedge.” According to him, Margaret
had succeeded in ruling the appetites, and in practically introducing
philosophic love into poetry.
[386] [The _puy_ was properly a mound or other elevated place on which
competitions in poetry and song were held—eisteddfoddi.]
[387] [A racy preacher whose sermons on Brandt’s _Ship of Fools_ were
very popular. He preached on “subjects of the day.”]
[388] _Stultifere naves._
[389] Bk. i. cap. li.; bk. iii. cap. v.
[390] One of the peculiarities of the Albigensian heresy was that it
developed through the apostleship of women.
[391] With this motto:
Donnez puissance souveraine
Au croissant de France, tel cours
Qu’il vienne jusqu’à lune plaine
Sans jamais entrer en décours.
[All sovereign might do ye bestow
On France’s crescent; let it grow
Till a full moon in heaven it reigns
And never from that glory wanes.]
[392] Bk. ii. cap. xii.
[393] “Platonis, ceterorumque philosophorum, quos omnes errorum magistros
ostendimus.”
[394] “Nevertheless it must not be thought, when we make mention of
philosophy, that we speak only of that which is learnt in the writings
of Plato and other philosophers, for we get also from the philosophy of
the Gospel, which is the word of God, the holy and salutary precepts with
which Margaret was so well indoctrinated and instructed by her teachers”
(Sainte-Marthe’s Funeral Oration).
[395] People still went to witches and “Egyptians” to get antidotes for
love, or love philtres, or simply potions for securing good luck. These
potions were mischievously used, as morphine is to-day: it was what they
called selling the devil in bottles. Rabelais shows us his Pantagruelion:
Porta, Cardan, and other grave occultists or physicians have handed down
several of the prescriptions then current: opium was generally used
to produce delightful dreams; nightshade produced smiling illusions.
The principle of love philtres was derived from remote antiquity, and
apparently M. Brown-Sequard has borrowed something from them.
[396] For instance, a lady of Blois, attacked with a decline,
“bewitched,” it was said, had a mass said at Notre Dame des Aides; then a
witch lay full length upon the patient, mumbling her wicked charms. The
sick lady was at once cured; it is true that, two months afterwards, she
had a relapse and died, but the witch attributed that accident to her own
unruly tongue.
[397] Witches were the happy possessors of a number of talents: they
cured diseases by amulets or charms; they brought hail and rain; their
malign power played with the secrets of kings as well as of families. Two
young peasants of Nivernais, stalwart striplings and much in love, one
day married two sisters. On the evening of the wedding day, strange to
say, the newly-married couples, instead of making love, fell to blows.
All at once someone remembered that on the previous Palm Sunday one of
the young fellows had refused to give a piece of consecrated boxwood to
an old witch in that neighbourhood, and that she had simply said: “You
will repent this.” Off they went to the hag, brought her back with them,
gave her a warm welcome and a good meal; she relented and allowed one
of the men to drink from her glass; he recovered immediately and his
wife was satisfied. The other, on the contrary, who had not drunk of the
same cup, fell ill; soon he seemed in imminent danger; the witch, when
summoned, refused to inconvenience herself a second time: all offers
and threats were alike unavailing. The family was in despair, the whole
village at its wit’s end. The witch locked herself in; a hole was made in
the roof, she was dragged out with her husband and carried off. Arrived
at the bedside of the sick man, the husband said: “You are not going to
die”; but the woman refused to utter a syllable. Then the rage of the
bystanders knew no bounds: men who had been in hiding flung themselves
on the malevolent hag as soon as she withdrew, seized her, and flung her
into the fire. Others, more merciful or more apprehensive, managed to
pull her out, her legs horribly burned, carried her home, and tended her.
But the wretched woman, stoically wrapping herself in her pain, shut her
door, refused to send to Nevers for a doctor, and after three months of
agony died in her obstinate solitude.
[398] [An accomplished lady of the court of Ferrara, who wrote dialogues
and Greek verses, married a German physician, and died at twenty-nine.]
[399] [Medieval types of the perfect wife. Clotilde was wife of Clovis
I., King of the Franks (475-545); Theodelinde, Queen of the Lombards
(died 625). Both converted their husbands to the Christian faith.]
[400]
Le nom de foy et de bonté
A tant mon esprit mesconté,
Que je croy qu’il est en nature
Moins de bons hommes qu’en peinture.
(Melin de Saint-Gelais, in allusion to the order
of St. Francis de Paul, known as _bonhommes_.)
[“Goodness” and “faith” and all such cant
With me find sympathy but scant;
Nature doth fewer good men breed
Than live in pictures: that’s my creed.]
[401] Thus Paul Jove describes the villa on the Lake of Como, in which
he wrote his _Elogia_: a villa fanned by gentle breezes, hung on a
hillside dominating the lake, so rich in classic memories, so pure, so
blue; in the episcopal dining-room, Apollo and the Muses presided; the
drawing-room, dedicated to Minerva, contained busts of several great
writers of antiquity; thence one passed to the library, then into the
Hall of the Sirens, then the Hall of the Three Graces. Large windows
opened upon green flower-bedecked mountains, luxuriant valleys, rugged
granite peaks, a majestic horizon of eternal snow, and indestructible
glaciers, above which hung the beautiful transparent blue sky.
[402] [A conventual order for ladies of rank founded by the repudiated
queen of Louis XII.]
[403] “With a cable of love and fidelity welded together, I fasten my
barque to a never-yielding rock, to Jesus Christ the living stone,
whereby I may at any time return to port.” (Vittoria Colonna.)
[404] All the speakers in the _Heptameron_ begin by taking the communion.
[405] [The moralist who translated Pascal’s _Lettres provinciales_ into
Latin, and to some extent continued his influence.]
[406]
[Churches I saw (cries Margaret), rich, beautiful, and old,
And altars deck’d with images of silver and of gold;
My heart was fill’d with pleasure as I heard new strains of song,
And saw the gleaming tapers and the torches pass along,
And heard the merry clash and clang of bells high overhead,
To mortal ears astounding: oh, ’tis heaven below, I said.]
[407] Bonaventure des Périers, Tale 35.
[408] The Bible was much in request. Editions in the vulgar tongue had
long been popular in Germany and Italy. Lefèvre d’Etaples, who produced
his translation in 1523, had passed his life in expounding the sacred
books. In 1514, Charles de Saint-Gelais dedicated to Francis I., while
still only a prince, a translation of the Book of Maccabees.
[409]
Les aucunes sont bibliennes
Et le texte très mal exposent:
Jeunes bigottes, anciennes,
Dessus les Evangiles glosent,
Et tout au contraire proposent
De ce qui est à proposer.
(Gringoire, _Les folles Entreprises_.)
[Some are bible-women bold,
And very ill the text expound:
Bigots young and bigots old
Gloss the Gospels round and round,
Preaching doctrine far from sound.]
[410] M. Gebhardt has well characterised this spirit of Italy: “The
astonishing intellectual freedom with which Italy treated dogma and
discipline; the serenity she was able to preserve in face of the great
mystery of life and death; the art she devoted to the reconciliation
of faith with rationalism; her dallyings with formal heresy, and the
audacities of her mystic imagination: the enthusiasm of love which often
carried her up to the loftiest Christian ideal—such was the original
religion of Italy”—that of the Renaissance as of the Middle Ages.
Alexander II. and Julius II. scandalised everybody beyond the borders of
Italy: in Italy, no one.
[411] Tale 34.
[412] [A wealthy _bourgeoise_ who held a literary salon frequented by the
Encyclopaedists—Diderot, D’Alembert, and the rest.]
[413] “Grant, I beseech thee, Lord, that by the humility that becomes the
creature and by the pride thy greatness demands, I may adore thee always,
and that, in the fear thy justice imposes, as in the hope thy clemency
justifies, I may live eternally and submit to thee as the Almighty,
follow thee as the All-wise, and turn towards thee as towards Perfection
and Goodness. I beseech thee, most tender Father, that thy living fire
may purify me, thy radiant light illumine me; that this sincere love for
thee may profit me in such wise that, never finding let or hindrance in
things of this world, I may return to thee in happiness and safety.”
[414]
I have transgresséd all God’s Holy laws;
To stint my story, I except not one.
[415]
Las, tous ces motz ne voulois escouter,
Mais encore je venois à douter
Si c’estoit vous, ou si par adventure
Ce n’estoit rien qu’une simple escripture.
[I would not hear those words, but still
A doubt my wearied soul would fill,
Whether ’twere very you indeed,
Or chance had given me trash to read.]
[416] In her _Comédie sur le trespas du Roy_ the shepherdess Amarissima
(that is, she herself) mourns the death of the god Pan; she no longer
believes in anything—either human virtue, or human consolations, or
even the old-time constancy. She has lost her philosophy! In the
end, the Paraclete comes to restore our serenity by the assurance
that Pan is tasting Elysian joys in the eternal meadows. At the
carnival of Mont-de-Marsan in 1547, the princess, shaking off mournful
preoccupations, put another comedy on the stage, in which she brought
into opposition a beautiful lady of fashion, a superstitious lady who
speaks of death and paradise, and a wise woman who advocates equilibrium
of soul and body; then the “Queen of God” (we may guess who she is)
upsets it all—the world, superstition, and wisdom—with a philosophic
panacea of divine and human love commingled. We shall not be expected,
however, to follow Margaret in the meanderings of her thought, nor even
in her prayers “of the faithful soul,” or “to Jesus Christ”—earnest
appeals to the love and favour and mercy of the Most High, who can save
us only by love.
[417] See the close of the _Navire_, a poem devoted to the praise of
love and to the glorification of the beauty and virtues of the late king
Francis I.
[418]
“Souvienne toy qu’ilz sont nés imparfaitz,
Et que de chair fragile tous sont faitz.”
[Remember that imperfect were they born,
And of frail flesh God’s creatures all are made.]
[419]
“Priez Dieu pour les trespassez,
Dont le retour est incongneu.”
[Pray God for sinners whose return
From Death’s far bourn is all unknown.]
Very few have returned, “the way is long!”
[420] [The architect and sculptor (1400-1469) known as Philaretes, who
mingled pagan mythology and Christian legend in his designs for the
bronze gates of St. Peter’s, and in his _Treatise, on Architecture_
taught that a true architect should possess all the virtues.]
[421] [The _palinod_ was properly a poem in honour of the Immaculate
Conception. Several such poems were recited on a set day, and a prize was
awarded to the best.]
[422]
The flesh! ’Tis mortal, fed with mortal food!
Love’s spirit nourishes true hearts and good.
[423] [Author of _De perpetuo in terris gaudio piorum_. Basle, 1558.]
[424] _Heptameron_, Prologue.
[425] This was before Luther, or independently of him. Erasmus pleasantly
scoffs at prayers to the Virgin or to St. Christopher, and is convinced
that the vows of sailors during a tempest are to be traced simply to
paganism, the ancient worship of Venus, “Star of the Seas.” He has
glorified the Virgin in cold but elegantly rhetorical verses, in which
the Styx, Phlegethon, Helicon, and the Castalian fount proclaim the new
spirit. While in former days Louis XI., for the slightest tribulation,
struck a medal to the Virgin or went on a pilgrimage, neither Louis XII.
nor Francis I., who will not be regarded as Lutherans, had any such
idea; in an extreme case, Louis XII. pays his vows direct in the Holy
Eucharist. Sannazaro, who remained faithful to the Virgin, declared
himself of Spanish descent.
[426] [Disappointed of a cardinalate, he undertook a polemic against
the Reformers, but was led to adopt their views. He had met Luther at
Wittenberg.]
[427] Heroine of Bandello’s love-poem.
[428] [One of the best modern Latin poets (1498-1550). He was nominated
by the pope as secretary to the Council of Trent.]
[429] “Who then has supported these men?” cries Alberto Pio: “the
dignitaries of the church, and the highest of them! They have maintained
at their voluptuous court these men with their half pagan leanings, who
pour contempt on all that is dear to the people, and strive only to
overturn existing things.”
[Pio was prince da Carpi, and a nephew of Pico della Mirandola.]
[430] “We,” he says, “nourished and moulded by Christianity, no longer
approach the thought of divine and eternal things except with a heart
full of vanity, a mind deadened and filled with the love of material
things. To the instruction of Scripture, to the responses and prophecies
of the Son of God, it is necessary to find (I am ashamed to say it) an
academic counterpart. We have gone back to the old state of polytheism or
atheism, to the maxims of antiquity.... In this paradise of study it is
necessary for every lover of letters that his philosophic mind, leaving
behind the pastures of philology (very pleasant, but in themselves futile
and of no account for what concerns the present object), should strive
to fill itself with the nutriment of sacred philosophy, the feast of
heavenly wisdom descended among mortals.”
[431] [A brief criticism of this excellent comedy is given in Macaulay’s
essay on Machiavelli.]
[432]
La foy sans amour est morte et endormye,
Aussi l’amour sans effect vient à rien.
[A loveless faith is slumberous and dead,
And love inactive naught accomplishes.]
[433] _Heptameron_, Tale 42.
[434] Renan.
[435] The art of evoking the spirits which hover about us, and of
entering by their aid into relations with the absent or the dead—an art
largely practised in France and Germany—was quite as pagan as the Italian
mythology. Trithemius, the famous abbot of Spanheim, laid down dogmatic
rules for it. Many spirits came without being summoned. There were
amiable spirits among them, simple domestic goblins who made themselves
useful. At the moment of death Agrippa was thus attended. There were also
troublesome fiends, like those tricksy sprites who visited women in the
darkness of the night. Jean Mansel relates the story of an unhappy woman
tormented every night by a sort of unconscionable husband, who was no
other than a jovial demon. At last, worn out, she consults a hermit, who
directs her to raise her arms at the critical moment towards a sacred
picture; with the result that the demon takes flight, not without cursing
the hermit.
[436]
[Theology he will expound;
But as for drinking water pure,
You’d better give it to your hound,
For brother Lubin can’t—be sure.]
[437] Oliver Maillard declaims at St. Jean de Grêve, Paris: “O women, O
flaunting wenches, bethink ye well. Why fill your time with amusements
and vanities? You will have to answer, not for the conceptions of
Aristotle, nor the learning of idealists or realists, of legists or
physicians, but for your good or evil life.... Lift up your hearts,
ladies; are you good theologians?” That is what he finds to say to women
who patronise and cultivate learning, to platonists penetrated with the
idea of the indulgent mercy of God, and convinced of the great number of
the Elect. (_Sermones de adventu_). A preacher is describing the Virgin
at the moment of the Annunciation: “What was she doing, ladies? Think you
she was occupied in painting and powdering her face? No, at the foot of
the Cross she was reading the Hours of Our Lady”!
[438] Maillard.
[439]
“Nec formæ contenta suæ, splendore decorem
Auget mille modis mulier; frontem ligat auro,
Purpurat arte genas et collocat arte capillos,
Arte regit gressus, et lumina temperat arte.
Currit ut in latebras ludens perducat amantem.”
(_Egloga_, 4.)
[Not content with her natural beauty, woman enhances the brilliance of
her charms in a thousand ways. She binds her brow with gold, artfully
colours her cheeks and knots her hair and rules her gait and manages her
eyes. She runs that sportive she may lure her lover into her secret nook.]
[440]
Dueil, jalousie,
Puis frénésie,
Puis souspessons,
Mélancolie,
Tours de follie,
Regretz, tensons,
Pleurs et chansons,
Sont les façons
D’amoureuse chevalerie.
Mieulx vauldroit servir les massons
Que d’avoir au cœur telz glassons.
[Jealous care,
Rage, despair,
Then suspicions,
Melancholy,
Freaks of folly,
Regrets, quarrels,
Tears and carols,
These conditions
Do our love-lorn knighthood bear.
Better to fill a hodman’s part
Than have such icicles chilling the heart.]
That is how the good prior of Liré, Guillaume Alexis, expresses himself
as he rides with a nobleman along the road from Rome to Verneuil. (_Le
grant Blason des faulces amours._) He continues in the same vigorous and
cutting style. What, replies his companion, disagreeably surprised, you
ask them only to work
Et de nul plaisir n’avez cure!
Tous pageaulx
Sont-ils égaulx?...
... Quant on est jeune,
Force est qu’on tienne
Le train des autres jouvenceaulx.
[And never to have a pleasure in life!
Varlets in hall,
Are they equal all?
When one is young
One needs must along
With other younkers rolling the ball.]
Nature speaks; Gawain, Arthur, Lancelot
Qui ne craignoyent ne froit ne chault
... Toujours estoyent amoureux.
Nous aymerons
Et chanterons
En noz jouvences:
Quant vieulx serons,
Nous penserons
Des consciences,
Menues offenses,
Et négligences.
Quelque jour récompenseront
Force pardons, prou indulgences.
[Who feared nor heat nor cold a whit,
Were ever in love.
Blithe and gay
With love and lay
Youth we will speed:
When old and gray
’Twill be time to pray,
Conscience to heed,
Follies to shun,
To rue good undone.
And some day indulgences, pardons galore,
Will help pay the piper and settle the score.]
The monk replies with a long discourse, flagellating the vices of women
and resulting disasters.
[441] _Reformationis monasticæ vindiciæ_, 1503.
[442] [Thenaud and Thevet were both Franciscans who travelled in the East
and published accounts of their adventures.]
[443] [He eloped with a woman, lived a Bohemian life for ten years,
and then returned to the hair-shirt and piety, wandering from convent
to convent. He was one of the earliest and most successful writers of
macaronic verse (_Opus Merlini Cocaii macaronicorum_).]
[444] [Noted for an excellent Latin verse translation of the _Iliad_. He
was a German.]
[445] Maitre Berthold, he relates, who had gone to Rome to seek his
fortune, had only succeeded after two months in finding a place as groom
to an auditor of the rota, to look after his mule. “But,” said I to him,
“that’s not the sort of thing for me, a master of arts of Cologne; I
can’t do things like that.” “Very well, if you won’t, I can’t help it.”
“I think I shall return to my own country.... Am I to currycomb the mule
and scrub the stable? Sooth, everything may go to the devil, for me!”
Again, Conrad Stryldriot writes: “’Tis the devil who brought me here, and
I can’t go back; there is no good fellowship here as in Germany; people
aren’t sociable; if a man gets drunk once a day, they take offence and
call him a pig. What is one to do? The courtesans are very dear, and not
at all pretty. I tell you in all truth, in Italy the women are uncommonly
ill made, spite of all their fine furbelows of silk and camlet.... They
stoop, and eat garlic and are swarthy-hued.... What colour they have is
paint.” (_Epistolæ obscurorum virorum._)
[446] “Post tenebras ego spero lucem,” wrote Jean Marot in 1415.
[447] “You cannot imagine anyone more useful or holy,” her friend Bembo
wrote; “I understand why your ladyship is so fond of him!” Again: “Our
brother Bernardino is adored here: men, women, everybody lauds him to the
skies.... I hope some day to converse with your ladyship about him.”
[448] Lavardin also touched the chords of feeling, and was thereupon
congratulated by Ronsard in a sonnet: he translated for the princess a
dialogue by Mark Antony Natta, on the Nature of God. He acknowledges that
in reality the subject seems to him inaccessible, whether one takes the
wings of an eagle or descends into the depths: in the end he thinks that
the incomprehensible had better be left to faith. But he dedicates this
work to Margaret in excellent verse:
A quel plus propre autel pourrions-nous présenter
Le sujet immortel de ce précieux livre?
... O perle, ô Marguerite,
O beau fleuron royal, vostre sang très chrestien,
Et toutes les vertus dont vostre grâce hérite ...
Nous font foy ...
Que des enfans de Dieu vous serez le soutien.
[To what more seemly altar could we bring
The immortal subject of this precious book?
O pearl, O Margaret,
Fair queenly gem, thy purest Christian ray
And all the virtues by thy grace possest
To us attest
God’s children all will find in thee their stay.]
[449] _Les très merveilleuses Victoires._
[450]
To love the mind, Madam, is loving folly.
[451]
Your arms are Juno’s, and your breast
The Graces have with beauty drest;
Your hand and brow Aurora sent,
A lioness proud your heart has lent.
[452] [Trissotin is the affected coxcomb and Vadius the pedant of
Molière’s famous comedy, _Les Femmes savantes_ (Act iii. scene v.).]
[453] [A Jewish physician whose Dialogues on Love were printed at Venice
in 1549.]
[454] Ronsard to Henri III.
[455] Baïf to Catherine de’ Medici.
[456]
L’homme à la femme y rend obéissance....
L’esprit bon s’y fait lourd, la femme s’y diffame,
La fille y perd sa honte, la veuve y acquiert blasme.
Tous y sont desguisez: la fille y va sans mère,
La femme sans mary, le prestre sans bréviaire.
[At court the woman rules the man....
The brightest wit grows sluggish, and women smirch their fame,
The maid loses her modesty, the widow her good name.
All there is masquerade: the girl without her mother fares,
Wife without husband; and the priest no breviary bears.]
All they think of there is
mendier le goust d’une vaine fumée
(Qui s’acquiert à grand’peine, et tost est consumée),
Piaffer, se friser, à faire l’amoureux.
(Jean de la Taille, _Satires_).
[to beg a spark of empty praise
(That’s very hard to kindle, and too quickly burns away),
To cut a dash, and dandify, a lover’s part to play.]
[457]
[Happy the age when wild in woods
The naked savage ran,
When nuts and apples were his foods,
And man was yet a man.]
[458]
Multa tegit sacro involucro Natura; neque ullis
Fas est scire quidem mortalibus omnia; multa
Admirare modo, necnon venerare, neque illa
Inquires quae sunt arcanis proxima.
[Nature conceals many things within her sacred shrine; nor may any mortal
presume to know all things; many things indeed thou mayst admire, aye,
reverence, without prying into those that lie closest to the mysteries.]
[459] Yet Ronsard and his friends made the mistake of believing that the
language should be aristocratic, and that it was for writers, not for the
people, to form or reform it.
[460]
[Alas! when shall I see again
The smoking chimneys of my village home?]
[461] [A popular French writer (died in 1566). He translated Bandello
into French, and his _Théâtre du Monde_, in which he discussed “the woes
of humanity and the dignity and excellence of man,” ran into twenty
editions.]
[462] [His _Nouvel Amour_ appeared along with Héroët’s _Opuscules
d’Amour_.]
[463]
[Then I perceived that, ignorant as yet
Of her high worth, I worshipped Margaret,
As, all unwitting, we admire the heavens.]
[464] [Andrea Navagero, commentator on the classics, author of _Viaggio_.]
[465]
[Nothing remained in all the realm of France
Holy and pure, of antique charity,
Save Margaret, a human deity.]
[466] The 16th century was the golden age of women’s education.
[467] [The hôtel de Rambouillet was the famous salon held by the marquise
de Rambouillet, where met a crowd of wits, fops, and scholars, to set
fashions for society and for literature. This was the headquarters of
the _Précieuses_, who were anxious to polish the language, and who
introduced, among forms of expression which time has approved, absurd
affectations like the Euphuism of the previous century in England.]
[468] When women were not supposed to be able to do more than
“distinguish a doublet from trunk-hose.” [A quotation from Molière’s _Les
Femmes savantes_, Act ii. sc. vii.]
[469] Tale ii., “Corruptio optimi pessima.”
[470] “Venus has caught the ladies in her toils, and God is tired!”
(Montaiglon). Tavannes asks that someone will shut women’s mouths.
[471] St. Theresa goes to these words from the Song of Songs: “The milk
of thy breasts is sweeter than wine, and from them riseth a savour more
excellent than precious ointments”; or to these: “I sat down under his
shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.”
[472]
Peace and joy in living reign no longer here;
Music and the dance to silence are constrained.
[473] Cf. the following well-known passage from the _Apology of Raymond
de Sebonde_ (_Essays_, ii. cap. xii.): “The soul, by reason of her
trouble and imbecility, as unable to subsist of herself, is ever and
in all places questing and searching comforts, hopes, foundations, and
foreign circumstances on which she may take hold and settle herself. And
how light and fantastical soever his invention doth frame them unto him,
he notwithstanding relieth more surely upon them, and more willingly,
than upon himself.... It is for the punishment of our temerity, and
instruction of our misery and incapacity, that God caused the trouble,
downfall, and confusion of Babel’s tower. Whatsoever we attempt without
his assistance, whatever we see without the lamp of his grace, is but
vanity and folly. With our weakness we corrupt and adulterate the very
essence of truth (which is uniform and constant) when fortune giveth us
the possession of it.” [Florio.]
[474] “Nam vere sumus omnes de muliere” (_Facetus_).
INDEX
Accolti, Bernardo, itinerant singer, 273.
age of marriage, 27, 28, 98.
Agrippa, Cornelius, his view of marriage, 21;
on Louise of Savoy, 166 _n_;
book on the Pre-eminence of the Female Sex, 400;
lectures on Plato, 402.
Alexander VI., pope, on Urbino marriage, 52;
his hunting, 247;
on monks, 463.
Alfonso of Aragon’s wedding, 40.
Alfonso of Naples’ dinners, 231.
Alione’s ballad, 121 _n_;
anecdote by, 222.
almsgiving, 66-69.
_Amadis de Gaule_, its popularity, 269.
Amaretta, Costanza, 339, 340.
‘amateurs,’ 56, 264, 388.
Amboise, cardinal of, 146, 257.
Andrelini, Fausto, 17, 326.
Anet, château of Diana of Poitiers, 387.
animals, platonist attitude towards, 244.
Anne de Graville quoted, 198 _n_.
Anne of Brittany, 145, 375.
Anne of France, her first lover, 26 _n_;
as sick nurse, 54;
her charity, 68;
views on education, 85, 89-91;
on girls’ stories, 100-102;
‘school of manners,’ 103;
on maternal self-sacrifice, 105;
on mourning, 129, 130, 133;
on valour, 146;
on love-making, 165;
her character, 166-168;
idea of charm, 180, 181;
her platonism, 181;
compared with Margaret, 197;
opinion on ‘age of wisdom,’ 214;
on dress, 216, 218;
hunting, 252, 253;
books, 265;
political career, 313, 314;
love of art, 375.
Anne of Polignac, 131.
Anne of Vivonne, 385.
architecture, domestic, 224.
Aretino, on tutors, 79, 80;
his _Marescalco_, 80, 281;
on duchess of Urbino, 351;
courtesans, 201, 358, 361;
on nudities, 204;
his methods, 370;
relations with Vittoria Colonna, 390, 391;
correspondence, 394, 395.
art, 377, 380.
_Asolani_, Bembo’s, 156, 432.
Baden in Aargau, 259, 260.
balls, 232, 236;
Daneau on, 236, 237.
baths, 254;
Calvinists’ view of, 255, 256;
life at, 259, 260.
Battista Spagnuoli, his view of marriage, 21;
of baths, 258;
of monks, 460.
beards, dispute on growing of, 370.
Beatrice d’Este, _see_ D’Este.
beauty, platonist idea of, 158, 159, 161;
Bembo’s idea of, 160;
Michelangelo’s, 161;
distrusted, 196;
preservation of, 215.
Bembo, on Latin for girls, 96;
his _Asolani_, 156, 432;
on love, 159-161;
conversation, 294, 295;
handwriting, 304;
his Morosina, 366-368, 390;
his talk, 403, 404;
idea of poetry, 404;
relations with Olympia Morata, 428;
letter to Isabella d’Este, 432.
Beroaldo, Filippo, on drunkenness, 298;
on love and Propertius, 402, 403.
Bibbiena on Catherine Sforza, 29;
his _Calandra_, 79, 278, 279;
decoration of his bath-room, 256;
his letters, 307;
his liberalism, 432;
anecdote of, 463.
Bible, reading of, 155, 288, 438, 439.
_bibliennes_, the, 426, 435.
Billon, 481.
Blando, Michelangelo, on hunting, 251, 252.
_blasons_, 208.
Boccaccio, popularity of, 100, 268, 398.
Bonaventure des Périers, _see_ Des Périers.
Boistuau, 480.
Bonnivet, admiral de, 178, 213.
books, 88, 263.
Botticelli’s _Venus and Cupid_, 318.
Bouchet, Jean, on flirtation, 105, 106;
remedy for materialism, 147;
story of ladies of Poitiers, 288;
_Les Regnars traversant les voies périlleuses_, 392.
Bourget, Paul, his naturalism contrasted with Ruskin’s, 499, 500.
boutrimés, 300.
boys’ education, 75, 76.
Brandiolini, Aurelio, musician, 273.
Brandt’s _Ship of Fools_, 416.
Brantôme on tutors, 99;
on marquis of Pescara’s book, 124;
on spicy literature, 266;
on Mortemart ladies, 286;
on the court, 495.
Brascha, ambassador, 42, 43.
Briçonnet, bishop of Meaux, 470.
Budé, Guillaume, _Livre de l’Institution du prince_, 250, 251;
on religion, 454.
burial customs, 129.
Burye, character in _Heptameron_, 385.
Calvin on women, 84, 467;
on divorce, 339;
character of Reformation, 467.
Calvinists, objection to fine weddings, 37;
to baths, 255, 256.
Cardan on marriage, 32;
on gout, 230;
on talk, 285;
life at Venice, 290 _n_.
Carnesecchi, 259.
carpet knights, 369.
Castelli, Cardinal, his hunting ode, 248, 249.
Castiglione, relations with his wife, 51;
theory of social aesthetics, 144;
on Raphael, 157;
on intellectual occupations for women, 261;
his _Courtier_, 265, 395, 404, 405 _n_;
on music, 274;
on talk, 292;
on duke of Urbino, 293;
handwriting, 304;
letters to Vittoria Colonna, 306, 395;
letter to Marchesa Scaldasole, 306;
on viragos, 319;
on painting, 377, 381, 431.
Cataneo, on two loves, 156, 159.
Catherine de’ Medici, _see_ De’ Medici.
Catholicism and colour, 220;
relation to philosophy, etc., 456 ff.
Caviceo, his _Peregrino_, 22, 239.
_Célestine, La_, 270.
Chailly, Louis XII.’s hound, 249.
Champier on marriage age, 28;
_Livre de vraye amour_, 45, 46;
on doctors, 59;
on love, 114, 168;
on women and men, 301.
charity, 66-69.
charm, theory of, 195-200.
chase, the, 246-253.
Christian socialism, 142.
churches, mundane use of, 237-240.
Church’s distrust of women, 422, 423.
Cibo, Caterina, _papaline_, 428, 457.
_cicisbeo_, 346, 347.
classics, respect for, 143, 156, 157.
clergy, character of, 165, 434-438.
Clichtoue’s philosophy of life, 146, 147.
Clouet, Jean, 207.
college education, 75, 76, 78.
Collérye, Roger, quoted, 46 _n_, 115 _n_.
Colonna, Ascanio, 312.
Colonna, Pompeo, his _Apologia pro mulieribus_ (MS. in M. de Maulde’s
possession), 399, 400.
Colonna, Vittoria, age of betrothal, 27;
widowhood, 131, 316, 317;
relations with Michelangelo, 163, 182, 183, 395;
on painting, 182;
relations with Carnesecchi, 259;
letter to Paulo Giovio, 292;
handwriting, 304;
letters, 305-308, 450, 451;
character, 316, 317, 328;
relations with Aretino, 390, 391;
with Dolce, 394;
with Bembo, 394;
her poetry, 163, 404, 405;
religion, 428, 469;
relations with Pole, 429;
her prayer, 442;
relations with Ochino, 469, 470.
colours, 219-221.
complexions, 199.
concubinage, 113, 363-366.
Condivi on Michelangelo, 162, 182, 183.
Consentana, countess of, anecdote of, 129.
conversation, 284-302, 345, 347.
coquetry, 187.
Coquillart, 105, 325.
Correggio’s _St. Jerome_, 449;
_Mystic Marriage_, 450.
correspondence, 304-310.
Costa, Lorenzo, picture by, 276.
country life, 242, 243.
country squires, 64, 140.
courtesans, 356-362.
_Courtier_, Castiglione’s, 265, 395, 404.
Cremonini, 152.
_Cymbalum_, Des Périers’, 386, 393.
D’Albret, Charlotte, 131.
D’Albret, Henri, 53, 334, 352.
D’Amboise, Catherine, 444.
D’Amboise, Françoise, 132.
D’Amboise, Michel, 206, 252.
dancing, 233-237.
Daneau on dancing and balls, 236, 237.
Dangu, Nicolas, 384.
Dante, 406.
D’Aragona, _see_ Tullia.
De Beaulieu, Eustorg, 99.
De Bourbon, Gabrielle, expenditure, 66;
lack of dowry, 117;
death of her son, 126;
religious works, 443.
De Clermont, Mlle, 24, 385.
De Longray, Mme, 385.
De’ Medici, Catherine, her ‘flying squadron,’ 103.
De’ Medici, Julian, 205.
De Montausé, 384.
Des Périers, Bonaventure, 59, 386, 387;
his _Cymbalum_, 386, 393, 418.
De Pons, 315, 316.
De Soubise, Madame, 315.
Desprez, Josquin, 275.
D’Este, Beatrice, 318.
D’Este, Isabella, setter of fashions, 219;
on pilgrimage, 240;
love of art, 374, 375.
D’Etampes, duchess, 364.
dialogues, 156, 403.
Diana of Poitiers, as widow, 131;
her portraits, 207, 211;
statue of, by Goujon, 208;
relations with king, 364, 365;
love of art, 387.
divorce, 127, 338, 339.
doctors, 55-58.
Dolce on misadventures of husbands, 58;
on education, 94, 95;
the moon, 423.
domestic letters, 117 _n_, 126, 304-310.
dowries, 117-119.
‘dragons,’ 330, 331.
drama, 278-283.
dress, 216-223.
drinking, 229, 230.
Du Bellay, 169 _n_, 362, 365, 408, 476, 477, 479, 483, 484.
Du Four, 165.
Dürer’s women, 203.
dwelling house, 223, 224.
eating, customs in, 229-231.
education, 74-78, 86-100.
Egnatius, 31.
Eleanor, wife of Francis I., 53.
Equicola, _Di natura d’amore_, 161.
Erasmus, on virginity, 32;
on maternity, 48;
education, 82, 97;
husbands, 116;
women’s stupidity, 157 _n_;
church music, 277;
his attitude to reformers, 473.
Estienne, Henri, 84.
Eustorg de Beaulieu, 99.
eyes, 199.
_facéties_, 266-268.
Feo, lover of Catherine Sforza, 30, 321.
Ferrara, music at, 276;
talk at, 290.
Ficino, Marzilio, on platonic love, 154, 158, 159.
Firenzuola, on beauty, 196;
his stories, 299;
his inspiration, 399.
flirtation, 103-107.
Florentine worship of Plato, 153, 154;
idea of charm, 198.
flowers, 243.
Folengo, 465.
Francis I., 62, 125, 169, 170, 240, 251, 265;
his mistresses, 363, 364.
Francis de Paul, St., story of, 461.
Franco, Veronica, 358.
free love, 327.
Fregoso, detractor of women, 298.
French marriage customs, 37-39;
country gentry, 64-66;
society, 140-142;
worship of rank, 144, 145;
idea of charm, 198;
drama, 282, 283;
conversation, 296, 297;
letters, 308-310.
Gambara, Veronica, 364, 394.
gambling, 237.
Gastius’ table talk, 232.
Gazius, _Florida Corona_, treatise on health, 255.
German girls’ education, 89;
table talk, 297;
opposition to Italy, 415, 416;
liberalism, 433;
narrowness, 434;
monks, 466.
Gioconda, _see_ _Monna Lisa_.
girls’ education, 86-100;
tutors, 98, 99.
Gonzaga, Julia, 52.
Gonzaga, Leonora, 28.
Goujon’s statue of Diana, 208.
hair, popular colour of, 199.
hair-dressing, 216, 217.
handwritings, 303, 304.
Helysenne de Crenne, 39.
Henri II., 364.
_Heptameron_ quoted, 24, 25, 33, 34, 49, 53, 84, 112 _n_, 151, 173,
175, 189, 212, 213, 296, 298, 299, 329, 334, 335, 351, 353, 354;
realist character of, 382-385.
Héroët de la Maisonneuve, 344, 418.
history, 401.
hood, the, 217.
households, constitution of, 66.
Huguenots on dancing, 236, 237.
hunting, 246-253.
husbands’ authority, 109, 110.
Hütten, Ulrich von, 83, 466, 467.
hydrotherapeutics, 254-258.
illegitimacy, 338.
_Imitation of Christ_, 139, 150.
Imperia, courtesan, 358, 361.
impromptus, 300.
incomes, 64, 68, 117.
Inghirami, Tommaso, 280, 281, 300;
anecdote of, 431.
‘innocents,’ the, 212.
instrumental music, 276-278.
interviews, 29.
Isabella d’Este, _see_ D’Este.
Isabella of Aragon, 312.
Isabella the Catholic, 323.
Italian marriage customs, 34;
education, 94-96;
drama, 278-281;
conversation, 285-296;
letters, 306;
monks, 465.
Jeanne of Aragon, 312, 407.
Jews, hatred of, 478.
Joanna, wife of Philip the Fair, anecdote of, 114, 115.
Josquin Desprez, 275.
Jove, Paul, 52, 292.
Julius II., anecdote of, 68;
hunting, 247;
beard, 370.
kissing, 233-235.
Labé, Louise, poetess, on dress, 218;
accomplishments, 245;
on music, 274;
poetry, 412, 413.
La Bruyère quoted, 115, 210, 296, 372.
ladies’ letters, 305.
_Lancelot du Lak_, 269.
lapdogs, 244.
La Rochefoucauld quoted, 111, 184, 214, 314.
La Salle, Antoine de, 79.
La Trémoille, Louis de, 29, 117;
_see_ Gabrielle de Bourbon.
Lefèvre d’Etaples, 250, 264.
Lemaire de Belges, 79, 327, 401.
Leo X., 247, 280, 300, 362, 425, 431.
Leonardo’s _Monna Lisa_, 191;
ideal of beauty, 200.
letters, domestic, 126, 127 _n_.
letter-writing, 303.
liberalism at Rome, 430, 431, 433, 434, 473.
life at spas, 259, 260.
Limosin, Leonard, 207.
literature, licentious character of, 391-393.
Longueil, 473.
Louis XI., 118.
Louis XII., 64, 67, 118, 129, 234, 249.
Louise of Savoy, her views on education, 77, 85, 96;
her sphere, 170, 311;
her reading and books, 262, 265, 267;
her politics, 311;
on mystic love, 335;
her principles, 354.
Luther on celibacy, 32;
divorce, 338;
on women, 467;
his true relation to Reformation, 468.
Lyons, headquarters of feminine poetry, 411.
Madeleine, sister of Francis I., 309.
Maillard, Oliver, on bathing, 255;
his preaching, 459, 460.
_Marescalco_, Aretino’s, 281.
Margaret of Austria, her collections, 226;
career, 313;
parrot, 408;
poetry, 411.
Margaret of France (sister of Francis I.), on marriage, 49;
relations with her husband, 53;
on doctors, 53, 58;
influence of stars, 61;
charity, 69;
education, 96-98;
authority of husband, 123;
widow, 131;
remarriage, 134;
defects of women, 137;
remedy for materialism, 147-149;
names and character, 170-172, 245, 418;
her portraits, 170, 210;
theory of love, 173-175;
motto, 176;
platonic love, 189, 352, 353;
compared with Anne of France, 197;
_petit lever_, 213;
on physical decay, 214;
on wearing black, 221;
books, 263, 266, 267;
poetry, 274;
drama, 282, 283;
as a talker, 285;
her failure, 287, 475;
handwriting, 304;
moral scheme, 334;
toleration, 355, 475;
relations with Francis’ mistresses, 364;
intellectual influence, 378-383;
lovers, 384, 385;
writings, 386, 387;
vacillation, 418;
religion, 436, 437, 442-445, 457, 470.
Margaret of France (wife of Henry of Navarre), 486.
Margaret of Lorraine, 133.
Margaret of Savoy, 172, 481-486.
Marone, Andrea, 273.
Marot, Clément, 29, 165 _n_, 198 _n_, 212, 287, 315, 317, 353, 407,
457.
marriage customs, 37-42;
presents, 72.
Mary of Cleves, 67.
Mary of England, 129, 217, 274.
Mary Stuart, 92, 376.
materialism, 456.
matrimony, test questions for, 33.
Maupas’ sparrow, 407.
medicine, 54-58.
men of letters, 392.
Ménot on death, 491.
Michelangelo, his nephew’s marriage, 35, 36;
on love, 162;
relations with Vittoria Colonna, 162, 182, 183, 213, 214, 395, 396;
his _Eve_, 202;
_Last Judgment_, 204, 324;
_Virgin_ of Casa Buonarotti, 323;
_Pietà_, 323, 324;
ideal of woman, 324;
sonnets to courtesans, 359;
frescoes, 428.
_Mirror of the Sinful Soul_, 92, 386.
mistresses of Francis I., 363.
money, importance of, 117-121;
worship of, 145, 146, 148, 149.
monks, 458-466.
_Monna Lisa_, Leonardo’s, 191.
Montaigne on marriage, 46;
on capricious treatment of women, 52;
on business, 65;
on peasant nurture, 73 _n_;
on college education, 76, 78;
on women’s ‘policy,’ 86;
on his daughter, 88, 95;
on moneyed wives, 121;
on tears of mourning, 130;
his scepticism, 191, 479, 488-490;
on coquetry, 362 _n_;
on women’s virtue, 420;
on faith, 425;
on death, 491.
moon, woman compared to the, 423.
Morosina, Bembo’s mistress, 366, 367.
Mortemart, ladies of, 286.
motherhood, 71-74, 77.
mother-in-law, the, 110.
mourning, 128.
Muguet, falcon of Louis XII., 250.
music, 83, 88, 270-278.
Mysteries, 282, 283.
mysticism, varieties of, 446-448, 465.
mythology, use of, 156, 455.
Naples, love of art at, 225.
Nature and man, 138, 139, 254, 449;
platonist attitude towards, 241-243, 253, 254.
naturalism, Ruskin’s, 498, 499;
contrasted with Bourget’s, 499, 500.
needlework, 88.
Nifo, his changeableness, 152, 331;
catalogue of love-motives, 191, 192;
pen portrait of Jeanne of Aragon, 208, 209;
anecdote of, 327, 328;
platonism, 332, 333;
Phausina Rhea, 348, 399;
feminism, 369.
_Nouvelles_, 259, 266, 267.
nudities, 202-209.
nurses, 73.
Ochino, 339, 428, 469, 470.
Ockeghem, John of, 275.
Olympia Morata, 94 _n_, 428.
Ordelaffi, husband of Catherine Sforza, 321.
Orleans, duchess of, her charity, 66;
love of music, 273.
Ovid, popularity of, 265, 266.
painting, 396, 377.
_palinods_, the, 446.
Papillon, Almanque, 149, 480.
patronage, 393-396, 398.
Paul II., 247.
Paul III., 432, 469.
Paul IV., the ‘breeches-maker,’ 204.
pen portraits, 208-210.
_Peregrino_, Caviceo’s romance, 22.
Pernette du Guillet, 412.
Perugino, 375.
Petrarch, 234, 265, 272, 406, 487.
‘Phaedra,’ _see_ Inghirami.
Phausina Rhea, 210, 348.
Philippa of Gueldres, 133.
philosophy, love of, 401, 402.
physical exercise, 244.
Pia, Emilia, 288, 305.
Piccoli, Gabriele, 322.
Pico della Mirandola, 154.
pilgrimages, 240.
Pio, Alberto, 277, 454, 462.
plate, family, 229.
Plato, theory of love, 151-153;
vogue of, 154, 402, 448;
theory of beauty, 158, 161;
Nature, 241;
relation to Christianity, 425;
negative results of doctrine, 494-496.
platonic love, 213, 339-344, 348.
platonism, 154, 157, 164, 177-193, 197, 260, 297, 334, 336;
causes of its failure, 487, 488, 495-498.
Pléiade, the, 172, 478-481.
poetry, 262, 271, 404-408;
and hunting, 248-250.
Poggio, his _facetiae_, 100, 154;
on Baden, 259, 260.
Poirier, son-in-law of Monsieur, 117.
Poitiers, three maids of, 102;
ladies of, 288.
Pole, Cardinal, 429.
Politian, 154, 265, 409.
polygamy, 339.
Pomponius Laetus, 154, 278.
Pontanus, 88, 104, 144, 240.
poodles, 244, 407, 408.
portraits of ladies as Venus, 205-207.
Postel, Guillaume, 471, 472.
priesthood of women, 428.
princesses’ love, 187, 188.
publicity, writers’ objection to, 376.
Puritans and music, 277.
_puys d’amour_, 419.
Rabelais, pedigrees, 145;
on colours, 221;
antiplatonist, 325, 336;
his abbey of Thelema, 465;
his mysticism, 465.
Raphael on marriage, 36, 37;
_Vision of a Knight_, 330;
anecdote of, 431.
Raulin, Jean, his sermon, 108.
reading, 88, 262.
religion and aesthetics, 423, 424;
relations to philosophy and Plato, 425, 426, 479 ff.
Renée of France, on influence of stars, 61;
letters, 308;
career and character, 314-316, 456.
Romances, 100, 268-270.
Roman aristocracy, 143;
idea of beauty, 143;
liberalism, 430-434.
Ronsard, 60, 198, 215, 235, 343, 365, 376, 477, 478.
Rosera, Isabella, 409.
Ruskin, 111;
on nature, 137, 138;
his naturalism compared with Bourget’s, 498-500.
Sadoleto, 429.
‘Saffredent’ (character in _Heptameron_), 385.
Saint-Gelais, Melin de, 235, 327, 431.
Saint-Gelais, Octovien de, 167, 266, 300, 326.
Saint-Simon on Mortemart ladies, 286.
Salel, Hugues, 382.
Savonarola, 163, 164, 278, 297, 322, 459.
Scaldasole, Marchesa, 184.
scepticism, 479.
Semblançay, 141.
serving maids, 106, 112.
Sforza, Ascanio, 248, 249.
Sforza, Bianca, 42, 43.
Sforza, Catherine, widowhood, 29;
her wedding presents, 40 _n_;
alchemy, 61, 62;
character and career, 245, 246, 320-322.
_Ship of Fools_, 416.
slave girls as concubines, 113.
small families, 71.
sonnet, popularity of, 405.
Spagnuoli, Battista, on marriage, 21;
on baths, 258;
on monks, 460.
Spain, education of girls in, 91-94;
idea of charm, 198.
spas, 257, 258.
Spinola, Thomasina, 190.
stick, the, 110, 111.
‘stork-love,’ 355, 441.
story-telling, 299.
subsidiary marriage, 339.
Sygea, Loysa, 409.
table-talk, 231, 232.
Theresa, St., 92, 197.
Tiraqueau, 27, 35.
titles, love of, 143.
topics of conversation, 294.
tournaments, 245, 246.
Triboulet, 34.
Trithemius, 458 _n_, 463.
Tullia d’Aragona, her book on the Infinity of Perfect Love, 164;
her influence, 357, 360;
a poetess, 413.
tutors, 78-81.
Urbino, court of, 159, 290, 303, 381 _n_.
Urbino, duke of, 52, 145, 293;
duchess of, 41, 43, 52, 129 _n_, 309.
Valois, court of, 369, 486.
Vegio on tutors, 79.
Venice, marriages at, 41;
education at, 96;
idea of charm, 198;
music at, 277;
courtesans at, 361.
Venus, passion for painting, 201-205.
Vérard, publisher, 392.
Vergerio, 451, 452, 457, 458.
Vert-vert, 408.
Villamarina, Isabella, anecdote of, 320.
Virgil, unpopularity of, 265.
virtue represented in painting as repellent, 329, 330.
Vittoria Colonna, _see_ Colonna.
Vivès, on education of girls, 92, 98, 100;
on husbands, 111;
on dancing and kissing, 233, 234.
vocal music, 270-273.
Voiture, 187.
_volta_, the, 236, 237.
war, 317-319.
wealth, worship of, 222, 236.
widows, 128-134.
witchcraft, 426, 427.
women as professional writers, 409, 410.
Zwingle on education, 82.
GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.
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